Page 104 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ACT WITH INTEGRITY

realized that one of their main goals was to isolate us and make us think
that we’d all been fired because we’d done something wrong. We began to
talk about what our responsibilities might be and to speak out about it.
None of us had really spoken out.”

Iglesias gave a great deal of thought to whether he should comment pub-
licly. “I don’t want to portray myself as a saint because I considered not
saying anything about the firing and just going with the flow, but it just
didn’t sit right with me. I kept thinking about how wrong it was and that
I had to tell the public what happened,” he explained. “It was like an
endless loop of tape that began and ended at the same point, which was
this: If they’re going to do it to me, they’re going to do it to somebody else.
If I let them get away with it, they’re going to lean on some future U.S.
attorney and maybe even on a more important type of case. It was really
a matter of right and wrong. Partisan politics had nothing to do with it. It
was wrong, and I needed to speak out about it. I was just incredibly
fortunate that I had other U.S attorneys with similar stories.” Iglesias wrote
a book about the experience titled In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked
the Bush Administration.
Congressional hearings into the prosecutors’ dismissals took place in
early 2007, and although Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dismissed the
33
incident as “an overblown personnel matter,” many high-ranking Justice
Department officials ended up resigning in the wake of the investigation,
including Gonzales. In September 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey
launched a criminal inquiry into the matter. He named acting U.S. Attor-
ney Nora Dannehy as prosecutor to investigate whether Gonzales and oth-
ers should face felony charges as a result of their roles in the firings.
When former White House Fellows Iglesias and McKay appeared
together on Meet the Press, McKay told the late Tim Russert that U.S.
attorneys must “not allow politics into the work that we do in criminal
prosecutions.” Through it all, neither one of them lost sight of the require-
ment of every public official to be prepared to pay the price for doing the
right thing.

33 Alberto R. Gonzales, “They Lost My Confidence: Attorneys’ Dismissals Were Related to
Performance, Not to Politics,” USA Today, March 7, 2007, p. A10. www.usatoday.com/
printedition/news/20070307/oppose07.art.htm. Retrieved on August 11, 2008.

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