KEY POINTS:
LOS ANGELES - President George W. Bush's Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales, was fighting for his political life as a scandal erupted over the firing of eight politically inconvenient federal prosecutors.
Senior Democrats say the sackings are a brazen attempt by the White House to compromise the independence of the United States justice system. Loyal Bush cohort Gonzales admitted that "mistakes were made" but said he stood by his decision at the end of last year. Hours earlier, his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, resigned and the Democratic leadership of the Senate Judiciary Committee insisted Gonzales should go too.
"US attorneys have always been above politics, and this Administration has blatantly manipulated the system to serve its political needs," Senator Chuck Schumer said. "The President must clarify his role ... There's a cloud over the White House."
The Bush Administration thus finds itself assailed on yet another front just a week after Scooter Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, was convicted on perjury charges. Just as the Administration has been accused of playing politics with intelligence on Iraq or on scientific research into global warming, it now faces the charge that it tried to manipulate the federal prosecution system for its own partisan purposes.
Democratic presidential hopefuls turned up the heat. Senator Barack Obama said Americans "deserve to know who in the White House is pulling the strings at the Department of Justice, and why". John Edwards said: "Attorney-General Gonzales should certainly resign now." And Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said: "The buck should stop somewhere."
The Democratic leadership in Congress first became suspicious when it received a tip that the eight prosecutors were dismissed because they refused to follow up alleged voter fraud in electoral races that Republican candidates had narrowly lost. That suspicion took on much greater substance on Tuesday with the publication of an email exchange between Sampson and Harriet Miers, who served until recently as the Bush Administration's top lawyer.
Miers originally suggested firing all 93 federal prosecutors and replacing them with political appointees - a suggestion deemed impractical because of the red tape involved. Sampson offered her a list of federal prosecutors "we now should consider pushing out". All the names on his list ended up on the chopping block.
The email exchange has clearly contradicted earlier assertions by Gonzales and others that the dismissals had been decided by the Justice Department independently.
Gonzales sought to blame the contradiction on communication problems at the Justice Department. He claimed not to know about the contacts between Sampson and Miers until after he had testified to a congressional committee that no such contacts had taken place.
All the President's people
* Alberto Gonzales was elevated by President George W. Bush to the Texas Supreme Court, then became his first White House counsel.
* He helped formulate policies that critics blame for contributing to the torture of foreign detainees.
* Gonzales was the target of criticism for Bush's warrantless domestic spying programme.
* His Justice Department includes the FBI. A report by the department's inspector general found that the FBI abused its power by illegally obtaining private records in terrorism and spying probes.
* Harriet Miers served as Bush's personal lawyer when he was Governor of Texas and was briefly nominated to the Supreme Court.
* A protege of Karl Rove, Bush's top advisor, replaced a fired Arkansas prosecutor.
- REUTERS, INDEPENDENT
