The Wall Street Journal fleshes out an earlier Atlanta Journal-Constitution report about the mysterious disappearance of acting U.S. Attorney Sally Yates’s name from the list of candidates for the Northern District of Georgia.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) called the White House earlier this year trying to block Yates’s appointment as the district’s top federal prosecutor, the Journal reported. Lewis withdrew his objections last month in a call to White House counsel Greg Craig after news media queries, the Journal reported, citing “two government officials with knowledge of the matter.”

Both the WSJ and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted that Yates had prosecuted more than a dozen public officials in Atlanta in pay-to-play schemes, including a Lewis friend and political ally, Bill Campbell, who served as Atlanta’s mayor from 1994 to 2002.

According to the Journal:

[T]he story of Ms. Yates, 49 years old, illustrates that even after three years of controversy over allegations of partisan meddling in the work of U.S. attorneys during the Bush administration, politics remains part of the selection process.

The Justice Department is still trying to repair damage from the scandal that erupted after Bush administration officials ousted nine U.S. attorney appointees in 2006 to make way for new political favorites.

The Atlanta newspaper reported Sept. 5 that Yates “apparently was on the short list, then off, then on again.”

Lewis’s chief of staff, Michael Collins, denied in an interview with the Journal that Lewis had tried to scuttle Yates’s nomination. Collins told the newspaper that Georgia’s House members collectively had decided to remove Yates’s name from a list of three favored candidates.

An advisory panel appointed by Georgia’s six Democratic House members forwarded three recommended finalists in April, including Yates; Atlanta lawyer Jeffrey Berhold, a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department; and Christopher Twyman, a partner at the Cox Byington law firm in northwest Georgia.

“We wanted to dispel any notion, based on your questions, that we were blocking Sally Yates’s nomination,” Collins told the WSJ.

President Obama on Thursday announced his nominees for Georgia’s other two prosecuting districts. They are Michael Moore (Middle District of Georgia), a former Georgia state senator and lawyer in Houston County, Ga.; and Ed Tarver (Southern District of Georgia), a Georgia state senator and partner at Augusta, Ga. law firm Hull, Towill, Norman, Barrett & Salley.