- After Tom Wales was killed…
The assistant United States Attorney in Seattle was gunned down in October 2001 for no apparent reason. Not that there weren't suspicions - he was a fervent gun control advocate who received lots of publicity, and he unsuccessfully prosecuted an eight-count indictment against two men on charges that included conspiracy to defraud the United States, mail fraud, and making false statements. One of the men was considered of particular interest. But there have been no arrests so far and, well, it's a six-year-old case that's going nowhere fast. The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin digs into the Wales murder in this week's issue. He also examines the lack of urgency from Washington on who killed Wales and why (neither AG John Ashcroft nor any of his top deputies attended Wales’s funeral).
The F.B.I. gave the investigation the code name SEPROM—short for “Seattle prosecutor murder”—but the bureau set the reward for tips leading to a prosecution in the case at twenty-five thousand dollars, which was widely regarded in Seattle as an insultingly small amount, and did not offer local investigators assistance from Washington, D.C. “We put a lot of agents on the Wales case from the beginning,” Charles Mandigo, the special agent in charge of the bureau’s Seattle office at the time, told me. “But we got no backfill from headquarters—that is, additional agents. In other major cases that headquarters really cared about, they’d say, ‘You’re not going to bleed resources, and you’ll get all the backfill you need.’ The feeling was that H.Q. was so preoccupied with 9/11 that they were neglecting the issue of whether it was fair to the office to have to put all its resources on the case without getting backfill.”
Wales was replaced by John McKay, who came from a prominent Republican family. Early, on, he recognized that the feds weren't doing much with the Wales investigation, and he said as much to the likes of Larry Thompson, then the Deputy Attorney General, and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
“In Seattle, you always have a sense that you’re an outpost, that people care more about things that happen on the East Coast,” McKay told me. Some of his colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office had a different view of the Justice Department’s actions. “These are savvy people,” McKay said. “They looked at all these things—who attended the funeral, the low reward, the energy and resources in the investigation—and they concluded that Tom was not in favor because he was the president of Washington CeaseFire.” (On the first anniversary of Wales’s death, Larry Thompson came to Seattle to dedicate a conference room in the U.S. Attorney’s Office to him.)
You might know where this is going. On September 22, 2006, McKay’s office received a glowing evaluation from the Department of Justice (he had reorganized the office, increased the number of prosecutions, and improved morale). On December 7th, McKay, along with six other U.S. Attorneys, were fired. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to current AG Alberto Gonzales, said that McKay might have been let go because he had been too aggressive in his advocacy of the investigation of Tom Wales’s murder.
Sampson’s testimony caused a sensation in Seattle. “The idea that I was pushing too hard to investigate the assassination of a federal prosecutor—it’s mind-numbing,” McKay told reporters at the time. “If it’s true, it’s just immoral, and if it’s false, then the idea that they would use the death of Tom Wales to cover up what they did is just unconscionable.”
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| 01:19 PM Jul 30, 2007 | Email the Daily Dragon | Email this Article | Post Comments |
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