His departure was announced late Thursday by the World Bank board.

Wolfowitz's departure ends a two-year run at the development bank that was marked by controversy from the start, given his previous role as a major architect of the Iraq war when he served as the No. 2 official at the Pentagon.

"He assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith in what he believed were the best interests of the institution and we accept that," the board said in its announcement of his resignation.

WASHINGTON, May 17 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s standing in Congress became even shakier today as Senate Democrats called for a vote of no confidence in him, and the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and others predicted that the furor over Mr. Gonzales’s leadership of the Justice Department would end with his resignation.

Mr. Gonzales’s position was weakened by disclosures this week about his involvement in 2004, when he was White House counsel, in an attempt to circumvent Justice Department officials who had refused to renew authority for the Bush administration’s secret domestic eavesdropping program.

Those disclosures were cited this afternoon by Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, both Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, called for a no-confidence vote on Mr. Gonzales.

“We need an attorney general who is a prosecutor, not a puppet,” said Mr. Schumer, who has been one of Mr. Gonzales’s sternest critics.

Ms. Feinstein said Mr. Gonzales’s record had caused her to have “a significant loss of confidence” in him. “Simply put, I don’t think the American people are well served by this attorney general,” she said.

Mr. Gonzales cannot be removed by a Senate no-confidence vote, but Mr. Schumer said it would send “a powerful message” to the White House.

Adding to the pressures on Mr. Gonzales was a report in The Washington Post today that identified additional United States attorneys whose names had appeared on various Justice Department lists in 2005 and 2006 as potential candidates for dismissal. Mr. Gonzales is already come under severe criticism for the removal of at least eight federal prosecutors last year.

It has been known that the names of a number of prosecutors were added and removed from Justice Department lists as officials planned the firings. The latest account, confirmed by government officials, said that as many as 26 prosecutors had been considered for removal.
[snip]
With the new disclosures have come additional bad news for Mr. Gonzales, as more Republicans have said he should realize it is time to quit.

“When you have to spend more time up here on Capitol Hill instead of running the Justice Department, maybe you ought to think about it.” Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas said. Earlier this week, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska joined the Republicans calling for Mr. Gonzales to step aside.

At the same time, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, all but predicted Mr. Gonzales’s departure. came closer to saying that Mr. Gonzales was finished.

“I have a sense that when we finish our investigation, we may have the conclusion of the tenure of the attorney general,” Mr. Specter said today at a meeting of the Judiciary Committee.

At a news conference this morning, President Bush would not discuss whether he had ordered Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then White House chief of staff, to the sickbed of John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to obtain his signature on an order reauthorizing the surveillance program.

In Congressional testimony on Tuesday, a former deputy attorney general, James B. Comey, suggested that Mr. Bush might have sent the two officials to Mr. Ashcroft on March 10, 2004, after he and other Justice Department officials had concluded the surveillance program did not comply with the law and refused to sign the renewal directive. Mr. Ashcroft was hospitalized with a serious illness at the time.

WASHINGTON, May 14 — Paul J. McNulty, the deputy attorney general whose Congressional testimony in February provided a spark that turned a smoldering issue over the firings of federal prosecutors into a raging inferno, announced his resignation on Monday.

Mr. McNulty, the fourth and highest-ranking Justice Department official to resign since the uproar began in Congress over the dismissals of the United States attorneys, had told friends for weeks that he was planning to step aside.

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Mr. McNulty said he would remain at the Justice Department until late summer, adding “The financial realities of college-age children and two decades of public service lead me to a long overdue transition in my career.”

The departure of another senior aide at the Justice Department appeared to leave the attorney general in a somewhat more isolated position. But with President Bush’s support, Mr. Gonzales has so far fended off demands by Democrats and some Republicans who have called on him to resign.

Mr. McNulty, 49, will leave after spending more than two decades in a variety of positions at the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill. He was a United States attorney in Virginia before taking the deputy’s job in November 2005.

Mr. Gonzales said in a statement that the Justice Department “will be losing a thoughtful and dynamic leader,” citing Mr. McNulty’s efforts on corporate and procurement fraud issues and in creating a new legal system in Iraq.

In a brief interview, Mr. McNulty said that his years working at the Justice Department and as a Congressional staff member had been “extraordinarily rewarding” and that he would soon begin looking for a legal job outside the government.

But friends said that Mr. McNulty had long chafed in his role as second in command under Mr. Gonzales and had realized that the furor over the prosecutors had probably ended his hope to be named to a seat on a federal appeals court.

Mr. McNulty, whose affable presence was said by friends to conceal an aggressively conservative approach to legal issues, had been shaken by the intensity of the storm over the removals and the sometimes sharp personal criticism directed at him from the White House and former Republican allies.

At times, Mr. McNulty found himself pushed aside by D. Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Mr. Gonzales, who granted Mr. Sampson wide-ranging authority, especially in personnel matters.

Mr. McNulty blamed himself for failing to resist the dismissal plan when Mr. Sampson brought it to him in October 2006, according to associates. He took one prosecutor off the removal list but acquiesced to the removal of seven others, according to Congressional aides’ accounts of his private testimony to Congress on April 27.