Rove associate got help with job

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department removed a prosecutor in Arkansas without cause to make room for a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove, a senior Justice official conceded in testimony Tuesday.

But Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told senators that the new interim prosecutor in Little Rock, J. Timothy Griffin, has more experience as a prosecutor than the U.S. attorney he replaced.

McNulty also defended the recent firings of six other U.S. attorneys in the West and Southwest for unspecified "performance-related" problems, and he said the Justice Department would strongly oppose Democratic legislation to limit the attorney general's power to name replacements.

"The attorney general's appointment authority has not, and will not, be used to circumvent the confirmation process in the Senate," McNulty said.

The testimony came amid an escalating confrontation between the Justice Department and Senate Democrats over a wave of firings of U.S. attorneys, including six who were notified by Justice officials in December that they would be asked to step aside.

The seventh, former U.S. attorney Ed Cummins of Little Rock, has said that he was asked to leave last year to give the job to Griffin, who previously worked for Rove and for the Republican National Committee.

Democratic lawmakers have questioned whether the administration was using the dismissals to reward political allies. Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, also warned McNulty on Tuesday that the Senate Judiciary Committee might issue subpoenas for job evaluations of the fired prosecutors unless the Justice Department agrees to hand them over.

Several lawmakers, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, have been further angered by a little-noticed provision slipped into USA Patriot Act legislation last year that allows Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to appoint replacement prosecutors indefinitely.