NBC News chief Justice correspondent Pete Williams reported that McNulty wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in which he explains, “I intend to step down sometime this summer. The financial realities of college-aged children and two decades of public service lead me to a long-overdue transition in my career.” Watch it:

Williams reported “it’s no secret” that McNulty and Gonzales “have been at loggerheads. They didn’t agree on how to handle the announcement of these firings of the U.S. attorneys.”

The AP reports:

Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty said Monday he will resign, the highest-ranking Bush administration casualty in the furor over the firing of U.S. attorneys, The Associated Press has learned.

McNulty, who has served 18 months as the Justice Department’s second-in-command, announced his plans at a closed-door meeting of U.S. attorneys in San Antonio, according to two senior department aides. He said he will remain at the department until this fall or until the Senate approves a successor, the aides said.

UPDATE: Last week, the New York Times suggested that McNulty was considering resigning, possibly over a growing divide between his supporters and those of Gonzales:

[T]here has been tension between Gonzales loyalists and backers of Paul J. McNulty, the deputy attorney general.

Friends of D. Kyle Sampson, Mr. Gonzales’s former top aide, and Mr. Sampson’s former deputy, Monica Goodling, blame Mr. McNulty’s February testimony for accelerating the furor over the ousters by prompting prosecutors to speak openly about their dismissals. But Mr. McNulty’s allies have faulted Mr. Sampson for misleading Mr. McNulty and other officials about the origin of the dismissals and the extent of White House involvement.

Mr. McNulty is said by associates to be considering whether to step down soon.

UPDATE II: Gonzales releases a statement: “Paul is an outstanding public servant and a fine attorney who has been valued here at the Department, by me and so many others, as both a colleague and a friend. He will be missed. On behalf of the Department, I wish him well in his future endeavors.”

UPDATE III: The pro-McNulty spin on his leaving: “Justice aides said he has been considering leaving for months and never intended to serve more than two years as deputy attorney general. But his ultimate decision to step down, the aides said, was hastened by anger at being linked to the prosecutors’ purge that Congress is investigating to determine if eight U.S. attorneys were fired for political reasons.”

UPDATE IV: From a 4/16/07 Wall Street Journal article titled, “Gonzales Deputy, in Crossfire, Looks for Quiet Exit“:

With Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the ropes over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, his deputy, Paul J. McNulty, is quietly testing the waters for a new job. [...]

Even before the controversy erupted, Mr. McNulty, 49 years old, had been making plans to join the private sector after 24 years in government, which included a term as U.S. attorney in Virginia’s Eastern District, people familiar with his plans said. Knowing he would like to take a higher-paying job, partly to cover tuition for his four college-age children, well before the end of the administration, his friends recently have sent out feelers on his behalf for possible corporate and law-firm jobs, the people said.

UPDATE V: Sen. Schumer (D-NY) responds: “It seems ironic that Paul McNulty who at least tried to level with the committee goes while Gonzales who stonewalled the committee is still in charge. This administration owes us a lot better.”

Digg It!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced today that he will bring the Feingold-Reid Iraq legislation to a vote as early as this week. Watch it:

“The bill stipulates that George W. Bush must begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 120 days of the bill’s passage and that ‘no funds appropriated or otherwise made available under any provision of law may be obligated or expended to continue the deployment in Iraq of members of the United States Armed Forces after March 31, 2008.’” The AP has more.

UPDATE: Reid’s full floor statement is HERE.

“According to one staffer involved in the investigation, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer and former Gonzales chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson all told investigators privately that Justice had never instructed them to preserve all documents related to the dismissals.”

In 2005, Congress defeated the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark spearheaded by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), which would have spent $200 million connecting mainland Alaska to an island home to 50 people.

Roll Call reports today that members of Alaska’s congressional delegation are persisting in making another bridge in the Alaskan tundra. Their pet project this time is for a bridge in the sparsely populated Knik Arm region, and the earmark “could mean a significant windfall for a number of people close to the Congressional delegation…some of whom purchased land in the area.”

Both Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Rep. Don Young (R-AK) have several relatives and former aides who own land or stock in companies with property in the Knik Arm region. Most notorious, however, is Stevens, whose underlings stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars from the bridge:

George Lowe, Chief of Staff: “[O]wns a 2.6 acre parcel of undeveloped land on the Knik Arm…Borough records show that Lowe’s land went from being appraised at $47,000 in 2005 to $57,500 in 2006.”

Lisa Sutherland, former aide: “[O]wns just under four acres on Knik Arm, which they purchased in October 2002. The value of the land went from $38,400 in 2005 to $65,000 in 2006, according to the assessment.”

Trevor McCabe, former aide: Owns stock in Point Bluff LLC, which holds tens of acres of land in the area. “McCabe and his wife also own a separate parcel on Knik Arm, 3.7 undeveloped acres. … The value of that property went from $37,800 in 2005 to $62,400 in 2006, according to the property assessment.”

Sen. Stevens’ cronyism here is a continuation of years of abuse of his power for personal gain. His son, Ben Stevens has received millions of dollars in consulting fees from several of Sen. Stevens’ projects (see the list HERE). For example, Sen. Stevens secured more than $10 million in federal aid to put the 2001 Special Olympics Winter Games in Anchorage. Ben Stevens ran those Olympics and received over $700,000 in salary for doing so.

Sen. Stevens also helped settle a disputed contract favorable to VECO, an Alaskan oil company which recently pleaded guilty to bribing at least four Alaskan officials, including paying over $200,000 in bribes to Ben Stevens.

U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, “once accused as a ‘dirty bomber’ and confined for more than three years in a Navy jail as an ‘enemy combatant,’ finally goes to trial here today on less sensational charges.”

The scenario federal prosecutors plan to present has nothing to do with the accusations in 2002 by then-attorney general John Ashcroft and President Bush that turned a former Chicago gang member into one of the most notorious terrorism suspects since the 9/11 attacks.

Instead, prosecutors…contend that Padilla, who converted to Islam after serving time in prison as a juvenile, left the USA in 1998 and trained in Afghanistan for ‘violent jihad,’ court papers say. Padilla, 36, is not charged with participating in a specific attack.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke warned prosecutors last summer that the indictment was “light on facts.”

Veteran investigative journalist Lew Koch will be covering the trial for FireDogLake. Rick Perlstein has more.