Bogden said the case that Ward, former U.S. attorney for Utah, brought him was weak and needed more investigation. He said his own attorneys were overwhelmed with a series of high-profile trials but still told Ward that they may be able to help out after the first of the year.
Bogden didn't last that long.
In December, he was one of seven U.S. attorneys asked by the Bush administration to resign.
In e-mails the Justice Department turned over to Congress, Ward complained that Bogden was resisting the case a week before they had a scheduled meeting in Las Vegas to discuss it. Ward fretted that the refusal might undermine shaky FBI support for the anti-obscenity initiative.
"For the FBI people to go out to LV and sit and listen to the lame excuses of a defiant U.S. Attorney is only going to move this whole enterprise close to catastrophe," Ward wrote to a senior official in the department's criminal division in an August e-mail. He urged Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to weigh in on the matter personally.
Bogden was surprised to read Ward's complaints.
"When I read the e-mails it was just really nonsense," he said in an interview with The Tribune. "This guy hasn't even met me and yet he's criticizing me of having made lousy excuses and being some kind of defiant U.S. attorney."
Bogden said it was clear the case was lacking.
"The case that was presented to me needed massive investigative work," he said.
In addition, Bogden was down six attorneys already and had other cases to juggle. One involved charges against 42 members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, which the judge had divided into seven trials. And there was an impending monthlong trial in a major public corruption case.
Asked why he believed he was fired, Bogden said he has his own theories but didn't want to publicly speculate.
Ward said before the September meeting he had met with Bogden's top two assistants who said they had no interest in prosecuting obscenity.
Ward said when he met with Bogden later on a specific case Bogden again declined, citing his attorney shortage.
"I told him this was a relatively simple case, that our Task Force would do most of the work, that other offices with serious personnel shortages had accepted cases and reminded him that the Attorney General had made it a priority for U.S. Attorneys to take one of these cases now and again," Ward said. "I also told him that I thought it was wrong for a prosecutor to refuse an obscenity case, because he would be deciding for the community what is and is not obscene, which is supposed to be a decision for a jury to make."
Ward said Bogden still declined but invited him to come back next year, which he said he would do.
In his August e-mail, Ward noted that, in the 10 months he had headed the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, only two cases had been indicted and only one was based on information from the FBI. "In light of this, the Task Force would have to be considered a failure so far," he wrote.
Ward continued pressing superiors, e-mailing Gonzales' chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, a Utah native, complaining that "we have two U.S. Attorneys who are unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them."
The other prosecutor referred to in the e-mail was Paul Charlton of Arizona, who was also fired in December.
A table prepared by the Justice Department explaining the cause for the firings noted that Bogden and Charlton had refused to prosecute an obscenity case. But a Justice Department official told a House committee only that the administration wanted new leadership in the Nevada office.
