DoJ Official Who Urged Cummins' Silence Linked to Blunt Fee Agent

The Justice Department official who in February prevailed upon former U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins to maintain silence about the circumstances of his firing is a former associate of Todd Bartels --a Blunt fee agent and brother-in-law to former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves. Cummins was the federal prosecutor investigating the Blunt administration's fee office scheme when he was told last summer that he would be asked to resign his post.

Last week, it was reported that a high-ranking official from the U.S. Department of Justice had called fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins in February to discourage him from talking
to the media about his firing. DoJ officials apparently gained interest
in keeping Cummins quiet when it became clear that there would be
Congressional hearings on the spate of U.S. Attorney firings, and he
was contacted by one Michael J. Elston.

H.E. Cummins III, who was removed last summer as a
United States attorney in Arkansas, said Michael Elston, chief of staff
to the deputy attorney general, told him in a phone call in late
February that any of the prosecutors who spoke to reporters could face
retaliation by the Justice Department.

Michael J. Elston, who now serves as chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, formerly worked as an associate at the Kansas City-based law firm of Shughart, Thomson & Kilroy, spending a couple years with the firm in the late 1990's. Elston's name appears listed as an attorney for Shughart on court documents dated 1998 through 2000.

Todd Bartels, whom Matt Blunt appointed as fee agent for the Sugar Creek license office, is currently a shareholder in the firm, having worked there since completing a clerkship for a federal district court judge in 1998. Bartels is also the brother of Tracy Graves, wife of former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri Todd Graves. Tracy Graves is herself a fee agent, having received the lucrative Gladstone license office from the Blunt Administration.

Curious that an individual with a professional connection to someone who might be implicated in a Missouri fee office investigation would have taken official actions aimed at keeping such an investigation quiet. Someone might want to ask Elston whether, prior to his conversation with Bud Cummins or at any other point in the U.S. Attorney purge, he ever had a conversation with his old Shughart Thomson & Kilroy colleague Todd Bartels.

Additionally, it's high time that the Department of Justice begin a follow-up review of the Cummins investigation of the Blunt fee offices. Given the amount of pressure that U.S. Attorneys like Cummins came under from DoJ leadership, it is obvious that the investigation and its results are so tainted and incomplete as to be a disservice to the taxpayers of the United States and the state of Missouri.