Firings flap overblown, Hatch says

WASHINGTON — Sen. Orrin Hatch said the Bush administration's firing of eight U.S. attorneys late last year was "badly handled" and probably should have been done differently, but nothing about the situation makes it worthy of all the attention it is drawing.

"I haven't seen anything that justifies this hullabaloo," said Hatch, R-Utah.

Democrats — and some Republicans — have called for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign over the Justice Department's firing of the attorneys, based on conflicting statements as to why they were fired and the unclear nature of the decisionmaking process behind the call for their resignations. But Hatch and other Republicans say this is just a political game by the Democrats.

"I don't want to see (Gonzales) crucified by the people who want to score political points," Hatch said.

Department officials say they fired the attorneys because of performance problems. The attorneys, who know they serve at the pleasure of the president, say they have clean records.

Thousands of documents and e-mails have been released to Congress showing conversations between the White House and the Justice Department. Many were written by Utah native Kyle Sampson, who resigned as Gonzales' chief of staff earlier this month. The documents include a list of attorneys to be fired, options for using the Patriot Act to replace the fired attorneys and a chart showing how to justify the attorneys' replacement.

Hatch, who represents Utah in the Senate, sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sampson is scheduled to testify before the committee Thursday.

Hatch said he expects Sampson "to tell the truth."

"He had a tough job," said Hatch, who knows Sampson. The BYU grad worked for Hatch on the committee before moving to other positions in the White House and Justice Department. "Human beings are human beings and they make mistakes."

Hatch said the administration could have avoided this controversy had it just thanked the attorneys it wanted to replace for their service and replaced them — as Republican and Democrat administrations alike have done in the past. But once it introduced "performance problems" into the matter, "that's what created the problem."

"I think it was very badly handled," Hatch said.

But regardless of how the department dealt with the situation, Hatch said, "Democrats have been way out of line."

"There's a lot of partisan politics here," Hatch said.