The conflict between documents released this week and previous administration statements is quickly becoming the central issue for lawmakers who are angry about the way Gonzales and his aides handled the coordinated firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

Democrats and Republicans are demanding to know whether Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and other Justice officials misled them in sworn testimony over the past two months. Yesterday, Republican Sen. John E. Sununu (N.H.) joined a handful of Democrats in calling on President Bush to fire his attorney general and longtime friend.

Gonzales has declined to address the apparent contradictions in detail, saying only that he was unaware of the specifics of the plan that Sampson was orchestrating.

The inconsistencies between Justice's positions and the documents are numerous. On Feb. 23, for example, a Justice legislative affairs aide wrote to Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) that the department "was not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin." But internal Justice e-mails show that the "appointment was important" to Rove and was closely monitored by political aides in the White House.

Last week, senior Justice official William E. Moschella told the House Judiciary Committee that the White House was not consulted on the firings until the end of the process.

But the documents released this week show that the plan began more than two years ago at the White House counsel's office, which initially suggested firing all 93 U.S. attorneys. Gonzales rejected that idea, and Sampson wrote back in January 2006 that Justice and the White House should "work together to seek the replacement of a limited number of U.S. Attorneys."

Schumer argued this week that Sampson "may well have obstructed justice" by not disclosing his communications to Congress and other senior Justice officials, who had said for weeks that the White House had only a limited role in the removals. "There has been misleading statement after misleading statement, and these have been deliberately misleading statements," Schumer said yesterday.

[link|http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/16897325.htm|McClatchy Newspapers] explains: "Mass firings of U.S. attorneys are fairly common when a new president takes office, but not in a second-term administration. Prosecutors are usually appointed for four-year terms, but they are usually allowed to stay on the job if the president who appointed them is re-elected."

This is not a debatable fact -- even within the Bush administration. As Gonzales's former chief of staff Sampson explained to White House lawyers in an Jan. 9, 2006, e-mail: "In recent memory, during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, Presidents Reagan and Clinton did not seek to remove and replace U.S. Attorneys they had appointed whose four-year terms had expired, but instead permitted such U.S. Attorneys to serve indefinitely under the holdover provision.'"