Well, sort of. U.S. News raises this potential defense of Alberto Gonzales in the prosecutor purge, only to immediately shoot it down. Turns out that Ashcroft's chief of staff, David Ayres, began the process of looking at which USAs should be up for replacement.

Among other steps that he took, Ayres approached then Deputy Attorney General James Comey for his thoughts. Comey gave Ayres the same list of those whom he viewed as weak U.S. attorneys that he would give Gonzales's Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson a year later. In principle, the former Justice official says, Comey was not opposed to removing incompetent people. However, Comey's definition of incompetence turned out to be quite different from Sampson's and had nothing to do with politics, says the former official. And the only one of the fired group Comey had identified as weak was Kevin Ryan, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco. But Sampson put Ryan on his list of top prosecutors.

Remember that Comey was the acting Attorney General (Ashcroft was recovering from surgery at the time) who refused to authorize the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in 2004. No wonder both Ashcroft and Comey got the boot. Obviously their definitions of "legal" and "competent" just didn't mesh with the White House's.

And you never thought John Ashcroft would look so good.