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Washington. Thousands of pages of internal e-mails and once-secret congressional testimony showed on Tuesday that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than was previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of US attorneys.

Aides to former President George W. Bush have asserted that the Justice Department took the lead in the dismissals, which triggered a months-long political firestorm.

Rove downplayed his own role in the firings in a recent interview and in closed testimony last month before congressional investigators.

But the new documents, released by the House Judiciary Committee after a protracted fight over access to White House records and testimony, offer a detailed portrait of a two-year effort by senior White House officials, including Rove, to dismiss some prosecutors for what appear to be political reasons.

Internal e-mail messages in the spring of 2005 at the White House showed that there was widespread unhappiness over David Iglesias, the US attorney in New Mexico, because of the perception among top Republicans that he was dragging his feet on voter fraud and corruption investigations involving Democrats.

In one 2005 e-mail, Scott Jennings, a top political aide to Rove, wrote a colleague that Iglesias should be removed because Republicans in New Mexico “are really angry over his lack of action on voter fraud stuff. Iglesias has done nothing. We are getting killed out there.’’

Iglesias was ultimately let go in December 2006, along with seven other federal prosecutors in an unusual purge of top presidential appointees. Iglesias had received positive evaluations from the Justice Department in Washington for his performance and his “exemplary leadership.’’

It is unclear who made the final decision to have him dismissed. Bush administration officials have publicly suggested that Iglesias was dismissed because of a subpar performance and absences from the office.

But those issues do not surface in the e-mails. Rather, the dissatisfaction of New Mexico Republicans over the investigations is the focus in 2005 and 2006.

In that February 2007, exchange, William K. Kelly, of the White House Counsel’s Office, wrote an e-mail to several senior officials, including Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and Tony Snow, the press secretary.

In closed testimony last month before congressional investigators, Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel under Bush, recalled getting a telephone call from a “very agitated’’ Rove in the fall of 2006, making clear to her that he wanted action taken against Iglesias.

“It was clear to me that he felt like he has a serious problem and that he wanted something done about it,’’ Miers said, recalling the telephone call from Rove. “He was just upset. I remember his being upset.’’



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