WaPo says Rockford guy at Justice meddled in OxyContin case

The Washington Post reported today that Rockford native Michael Elston, who was a senior official at the Justice Department at the time, phoned a U.S. attorney in Virginia last year and tried to get him to slow down in his prosecution of the manufacturer of the dangerous painkiller OxyContin.

The Post said the prosecutor rebuffed the effort and then soon found his name on Elston's list of U.S. attorneys to be fired.

Elston, who has been embroiled for months in the controversy over the sacking of eight federal prosecutors, quit his job at the Justice Department in June.

Four of the prosecutors who were fired have said that Elston implied by phone that they would face embarrassing recriminations if they didn't leave quietly.

Rockford guy cited again in connection with Justice Department scandal

Rockford native Michael Elston, a high-ranking official in the Justice Department who's already been questioned by a congressional committee in the Prosecutorgate scandal, was publicly mentioned this week in connection with a tangential matter.

ThinkProgress.org has the story here.

Background on Elston's involvement in the flap over the firing of eight federal prosecutors can be found here and through the links therein.

WaPo scribe calls Rockford guy "infamous"

Washington Post columnist Andrew Cohen has written a piece about how a group of "concerned Department of Justice employees" has blasted department hot-shot Michael Elston, a Rockford native, for his excessive ideological zeal.

Elston, you'll recall, has been implicated in the Prosecutorgate scandal, which has left Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hanging onto his job by a thread, with only President Bush still supporting him.

Several federal prosecutors have suggested that Elston might have criminally obstructed justice by trying to intimidate a couple of the U.S. attorneys who got canned last year by the Bush administration.