Washington ? White House political adviser Karl Rove more than two years ago began seeking input from the Department of Justice into how many U.S. attorneys should be fired in the second Bush administration, according to new e-mails released Thursday that show a deeper White House involvement in the firings of federal prosecutors last year.

The e-mails also show that the Justice Department was willing to defer to Rove on the matter.

According to new e-mails released Thursday, Rove in January 2005 asked the White House counsel’s office about its plans for the nation’s federal prosecutors and whether it would fire some or all of them.

Three days later D. Kyle Sampson, a Justice official and soon to be deputy chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, responded with a point-by-point strategy on how the administration might proceed.

“As an operational matter,” Sampson wrote, “we would like to replace 15 percent to 20 percent of the 93 U.S. attorneys” whom they considered “the underperforming ones.” The others, Sampson said, “are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies.”

But, as a “political matter,” Sampson cautioned that “when push comes to shove” home-state senators who supported their prosecutors likely would resist the firings. Nevertheless, Sampson said, “if Karl thinks there would be political will to do it, so do I.”

The administration eventually fired eight U.S. attorneys, at first saying they were let go for job performance reasons. But new details surfacing in a Democratic-led Capitol Hill investigation are suggesting that politics may have been the prime mover in jettisoning the prosecutors. The administration denies that.

White House officials have said that former White House counsel Harriet Miers initially floated the idea of firing all the prosecutors.

But they said her idea was scrapped by Gonzales and others who thought it impractical.

Also on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee authorized subpoenas for five top Justice department officials involved in the firings.