Deputy attorney general to resign, officials say

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Statements called 'inaccurate'
McNulty also told Congress that the decision to fire the eight U.S. attorneys in December was made solely by the Justice Department. He was furious, aides said, after learning later that Sampson had been talking to the White House about potential firings since at least January 2005.

Gonzales maintains the firings were needed to replace underperforming U.S. attorneys, and he has disagreed with McNulty’s testimony that Cummins had been fired for any other reason.

“The attorney general is extremely upset with the stories on the US Attys this morning,” Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, who was traveling with Gonzales in South America at the time, wrote in a Feb. 7 e-mail, a copy of which was released as part of the congressional investigation.

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“He also thought some of the DAG’s statements were inaccurate,” Roehrkasse wrote.

Gonzales and Sampson’s lawyer have both said McNulty should have been well aware of the circumstances surrounding the firings. In his own Senate testimony last month, Gonzales indicated he trusted his most senior aides, including McNulty, to decide which prosecutors would be asked to resign.

“It was to be a group of officials, including the deputy attorney general, who were much more knowledgeable than I about the performance of each U.S. attorney,” Gonzales said.

However, e-mails released by the department show McNulty was not intimately involved in all of the choices and at one point questioned the dismissal of U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden in Nevada.

“I’m a little skittish about Bogden,” McNulty wrote in a Dec. 7 e-mail to Sampson. He concluded: “I’ll admit have not looked at his district’s performance. Sorry to be raising this again/now; it was just on my mind last night and this morning.”

Republican loyalist
A former Justice spokesman and policy director, McNulty was keenly aware of the importance of the public’s perception of the department, which prides itself on its political independence from the White House.

Still, McNulty is also a longtime GOP loyalist who was spokesman for House Judiciary Committee Republicans during the impeachment of President Clinton and later directed the transition team for the new Bush administration’s Justice Department.

Earlier this year, he scaled back tough department tactics that aimed to curb corporate fraud after the Enron-era scandals. The so-called “McNulty Memo” limited prosecutors’ ability to obtain confidential data from corporations without first receiving written approval from the department.

McNulty also led Justice Department crackdowns on military contracts, most notably in Iraq, that were awarded or otherwise pushed by bribed officials. His interest in those cases largely stemmed from his tenure as U.S. attorney, where his office had criminal oversight of the Pentagon.

A native of Pittsburgh, McNulty is married and has four children.