McKAY “STUNNED”….Via Josh, fired U.S. Attorney John McKay reacts to the news that the White House was directly involved in passing along complaints that he didn’t investigate charges of voter fraud aggressively enough in the 2004 governor’s race in Washington — with the result that a Democrat was allowed to win:
Former U.S. Attorney John McKay said Monday night he was “stunned” to hear President Bush told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last October that Bush had received complaints about U.S. attorneys who were not energetically investigating voter-fraud cases.
….”Had anyone at the Justice Department or the White House ordered me to pursue any matter criminally in the 2004 governor’s election, I would have resigned,” McKay said. “There was no evidence, and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”
….”There should be no controversy at the Department of Justice, or anywhere else in the federal government, about how the 2004 election was reviewed,” McKay said.
Keep in mind that McKay is not some Democratic flunky appointed during the Clinton administration. He’s a Republican loyalist appointed by George Bush. He worked with the FBI to investigate claims of voter fraud and simply concluded that the evidence wasn’t there. But that wasn’t good enough for the local politicos: they wanted him to keep digging until he came up with something — anything — that would have produced a few hundred more votes for the Republican candidate.
But he didn’t, and that annoyed George Bush. So now he’s out of a job.
But it wasn’t personal. Just business. You know.
