Special prosecutor appointed to investigate US attorney firings

Though no official explanation was given for the purge, based on the timing and scale of the firings it was clear that the attorneys had been targeted for political reasons. Even though the attorneys were Republicans and Bush appointees, they were deemed insufficiently loyal to the White House. In most cases, they were fired for prosecuting Republican officials, and for failing to carry out voter fraud and corruption investigations with sufficient alacrity against Democratic officials.

Voter fraud is a charge Republican officials have used to block voter registration efforts and purge from the rolls sections of the electorate most likely to vote Democraticthe poor, students, minorities, the transient, the uneducated, the elderly. The firing of the US attorneys was thus but one element of a wide-ranging Republican effort to manipulate the outcome of elections.