White House Approved Sacking of Prosecutors

The Bush administration yesterday faced charges of trying to subvert the course of justice for political ends after it emerged in Senate testimony that the White House had been directly involved in the sacking of eight federal prosecutors.

The first direct casualty of yesterday's proceedings in the Senate judiciary committee was the credibility of the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, after his former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, demolished earlier claims that he had not been involved in the sackings.

But Mr Sampson's testimony may have inflicted even greater damage on the White House by exposing the intimate involvement of George Bush's most trusted advisers - the political supremo, Karl Rove and the president's former legal counsel Harriet Miers - in the sacking of prosecutors who did not do enough to further a political agenda.

"The decision makers in this case were the attorney general and the counsel to the president," Mr Sampson told the committee. "I and others made staff recommendations, but they were approved and signed off on by the principals."

Mr Sampson's appearance before the Senate yesterday was widely seen as a critical moment for Mr Gonzales. In recent days Mr Gonzales, a close associate of Mr Bush since the latter's time as governor of Texas, has faced demands to step down from Republican and Democratic senators. He has also come under attack from federal prosecutors.

Although much of the documents and testimony relating to the prosecutors remains technical, Democratic senators have produced evidence suggesting that the dismissals were carried out to block corruption investigations that were politically damaging to Republican leaders, or to punish prosecutors who refused to act on instructions from Republican legislators.

One of the sacked prosecutors, Carol Lam, had successfully prosecuted a Republican congressman from California, Randy Duke Cunningham, for corruption. Cunningham was sentenced to eight years in prison last year.

When the row over the sacked prosecutors erupted earlier this month Mr Gonzales said on more than one occasion that he had no hand in their dismissal. That claim, already challenged by documents released late last week by the justice department, was reduced to tatters yesterday by Mr Sampson's testimony.

Far from retaining his distance, Mr Gonzales had been closely involved in repeated discussions over the future of the prosecutors even before becoming attorney general, Mr Sampson said.

"The attorney general was aware of this process from the very beginning in 2005," he told the committee. "Ultimately, he approved both the [dismissal] list and the notion of going forward to ask for the resignations."

In evaluating the performance of the prosecutors Mr Gonzales was guided as much by their fidelity to the agenda of the administration as legal performance, Mr Sampson said. Democratic senators produced documents showing that some of the sacked prosecutors had been previously commended for their legal work.