Thousands of pages of internal e-mails and once-secret congressional testimony showed yesterday that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than was previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of US attorneys.Aides to former president George W. Bush have asserted that the Justice Department took the lead in the dismissals, which triggered a months-long political firestorm. Rove downplayed his own role in the firings in a recent interview and in closed testimony last month before congressional investigators. But the new documents, released after a protracted fight over access to White House records and testimony, offer a detailed portrait of a two-year effort by senior White House officials, including Rove, to dismiss some prosecutors for political reasons.