Legal News

Can Bachelor and Former U.S. Attorney Dan Bogden Come Home Again?

By Ashby Jones

The U.S. attorney scandal, which touched off back in late 2006 when then Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez fired nine federal prosecutors, has mostly moved off the front pages and blogs and to the history books.

But an interesting piece in the Atlantic Monthly surfaces a few good tidbits in the matter.

The piece, by Murray Waas, centers on Dan Bogden, who served as the U.S. attorney from Nevada until he was canned in December 2006.

To this day, writes Waas, Bogden has no idea why he was fired. According to the piece, a handful of the prosecutors got at least an inkling of the rationale behind their firings last September, when two units of the DOJ, the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility, released a 358-page report detailing their findings after a 17-month inquiry into the matter.

An entire chapter of the report was devoted to Bogden’s firing, but it concluded only that investigators “could not determine who was responsible for Bogden's name being placed on the U.S. Attorney removal list."

But one of the stranger pieces of information in the Atlantic story is this: That if he had had a wife and kids at home, he might not have lost his job at all.

Shortly after Bogden’s name had been bandied about as a possible cut, then deputy AG Paul McNulty expressed some qualms about his firing to Kyle Sampson, Gonzalez’s chief of staff. "I'm concerned about Bogden," McNulty reportedly told Sampson and a few other senior DOJ officials in the room. “[H]e's 50, hasn't had a job in [the] private sector, and what about his family."

According to Sampson's account, another senior official corrected McNulty: "He's a bachelor," the official said, "He's single."

As Sampson recalled to investigators, McNulty responded, "Okay never mind." McNulty, Sampson said, "then got up and left my office." Having learned that Dan Bogden was a bachelor, McNulty recalled, "I guess I don’t have any objection [anymore] to going forward."

But Bogden might get another chance. Last month, Nevada Democratic Senator Harry Reid, who happens to be the Senate majority leader, asked the White House to consider rehiring Bogden as Nevada's U.S. attorney.

A Justice Department official told Waas that the idea of hiring Bogden back is in fact a real possibility, and said that the White House counsel's office has been quietly vetting his background in anticipation of his possible reappointment.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 20, 2009 (boomark / email).