Uber...thats a good a question and I really dont know the answer.
However, one of the fired attorneys, David Iglesias, is pursing another avenue of formal complaint against his firing:
Quote:
When he wasn’t doing his day job as U.S. attorney in New Mexico, David Iglesias was a captain in the Navy Reserve, teaching foreign military officers about international terrorism.
But Iglesias’s military service in support of what the Pentagon likes to call the Global War on Terror (GWOT) apparently didn’t go down well with his superiors at the Justice Department. Recently released documents show that one reason aides to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales cited in justifying the decision to fire Iglesias as U.S attorney late last year was that he was an “absentee landlord” who was spending too much time away from the office.
(Iglesias did, in fact, leave the office for 45 days each year...to meet his responsibilities and perform his duties as a captain in the Navy Reserve )
That explanation may create new legal problems for Gonzales and Justice. Iglesias confirmed to NEWSWEEK that he was recently questioned by lawyers for the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency, to determine if his dismissal was a violation of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), a federal law that prohibits job discrimination against members of the U.S. military.
At the encouragement of Office of Special Counsel director Scott Bloch and his deputies, Iglesias said he is this week filing a formal legal complaint with OSC against the Justice Department over his dismissal on this and other grounds. (While the Justice Department normally prosecutes USERRA violations, the OSC, an independent federal agency that protects the rights of whistle-blowers, takes the case when the potential violator is the federal government itself.) “I want to make sure they didn’t fire me because of my military duty,” Iglesias said. “When I was away from the office, it wasn’t like I was going on vacation in Europe.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17951419/site/newsweek/
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Again, the Pres has the right to fire anyone in the Executive Branch anytime he wants, without giving a reason
(unless a specific reason is given that does potentially violate the law).
It is the subesquent lying, unsupported and undocumented reasons given, conflicting statements from DoJ and the WH, etc....that is the problem and that brought about the need and rationale for this Congressional investigation.