WASHINGTON — Thousands of pages of once-secret congressional testimony and e-mail messages released on Tuesday showed that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of federal prosecutors.
Early discussions at the White House in the spring of 2005 were focused on unhappiness with David C. Iglesias, a United States attorney in New Mexico who was later among eight prosecutors who were fired in a purge that created a political firestorm for the White House. A top aide to Mr. Rove wrote in an internal e-mail message in June 2005, a year and a half before Mr. Iglesias was fired, that Republicans in New Mexico were “really angry” over what they saw as the prosecutor’s inaction in pursuing voter fraud charges against Democrats in the state in tight elections.”
“Iglesias has done nothing,” the Rove aide, Scott Jennings, wrote to another White House staff member. ”We are getting killed out there,” he added, urging that the White House “move forward with getting rid of the NM USATTY.”
White House aides to former President George W. Bush have long maintained that the White House played only a limited role in the firings of Mr. Iglesias and the seven other United States attorneys and that the Justice Department took the lead in the review that led to their dismissals. Mr. Rove and Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, played down their roles in congressional testimony last month as part of an agreement to resolve a years-long dispute with Congressional Democrats.
Transcripts of their testimony — including many instances in which the two aides said they could not remember important details of the debate over the United States attorneys — were among the materials released Tuesday by the House Judiciary Committee.
A lawyer for Mr. Rove could not be reached immediately for comment.
The e-mail messages, in particular, raise questions about the Bush White House’s assertion that it played only a limited role in the firings. A federal prosecutor is continuing to investigate accusations that officials may have acted criminally in the firings or in their testimony to Congress about the incident, which led to the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and many of his top aides at the Justice Department.
Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who leads the Judiciary Committee and has led the push to examine the Bush White House’s role in the firings, said the e-mail messages and testimony contradicted major claims by Bush aides.
“This basic truth can no longer be denied: Karl Rove and his cohorts at the Bush White House were the driving force behind several of these firings, which were done for improper reasons,” Mr. Conyers said. “Under the Bush regime, honest and well-performing U.S. attorneys were fired for petty patronage, political horse trading and, in the most egregious case of political abuse of the U.S. attorney corps — that of U.S. Attorney Iglesias — because he refused to use his office to help Republicans win elections.”
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