March
2007
Having Loyalty or Taking Accountability
Two articles on the recent fiasco at the Justice Department. First they get busted for the FBI abuses of National Security Letters, now they are on the defensive for having fired US Attorneys for political reasons. The man in the middle is the boss, Alberto Gonzales. The White House is saying nothing, claiming that their memory is hazy. The articles below point at the justifications that are being offered to defend the actions taken. Today an editorial states that Gonzales’ loyalty to his boss is higher than the loyalty to the job he is installed to do.
Why are law enforcement officers (the judiciary) appointed by the president (the executive branch of government). Actually the same argument goes for the Supreme Court. If you really want to keep the branches separate, this seems like a backward way to go about it.
But you see what happens. Bush has appointed a lot of long time friends to high political positions. Loyalty matters. Competency may be less so.
By the way, there seems to be a lot of talk about accountability in the government. Saying “I am accountable” is not taking accountability, not by a long shot.
(Originals found here and here.)
The Reno Precedent
President Clinton’s attorney general fired all U.S. attorneys. So why is this different?
Thursday, March 15, 2007THE LATEST they-do-it-too excuse for the undeniably botched and increasingly suspicious firings of U.S. attorneys involves the 1993 episode in which President Clinton’s new attorney general, Janet Reno, unceremoniously dismissed the first Bush administration’s holdover U.S. attorneys. By comparison with the Reno massacre, we are told, the Bush administration’s canning of eight U.S. attorneys was positively restrained; if you suspect political motives in the current controversy, so the argument goes, consider that when he was ousted by Reno, the U.S. attorney in the District, Jay Stephens, was just weeks away from deciding whether to indict House Ways and Means Chairman Daniel Rostenkowski (D-Ill.). Inconveniently for these conspiracy theorists, Mr. Rostenkowski was in fact indicted and convicted — and, yes, he ultimately was pardoned by President Clinton.
The Reno precedent is a red herring, not a useful comparison. The summary way she announced the move was, indeed, unusual if not unprecedented. But a turnover in the top prosecutorial jobs with a new administration taking power — especially one of a different party — was not. As we wrote at the time, “These are political appointees who owed their jobs to the last administration and have expected to be replaced ever since last November’s election. It would likely have happened earlier had the Clinton administration not made such an adventure out of the appointment of an attorney general.” And so President George W. Bush, properly and unsurprisingly, replaced all but a few U.S. attorneys during his first year in office. Indeed, while it would undoubtedly have been disruptive and unwise, it would not have been illegal or unethical for the president to follow the suggestion of his then-White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, to replace all the prosecutors again in his second term.
The question, then, is what to make of the president’s move to fire several of the prosecutors. This recent group firing, in the midst of a presidential term, is unprecedented; Mr. Bush was simply incorrect yesterday when he described it as “a customary practice by presidents.” But unprecedented doesn’t equal wrong: U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, and he is entitled to have in place prosecutors committed to his law enforcement priorities. (The potential for misusing the newly bestowed interim appointment authority to evade Senate confirmation is a separate, and troubling, concern.)
Internal administration e-mails released Tuesday offer some indications of those sorts of policy-related issues, from references to “woodshedding” the U.S. attorney in San Diego, Carol C. Lam, over immigration cases to complaints about whether Paul K. Charlton in Arizona and Daniel G. Bogden in Nevada were balking at obscenity prosecutions. But there are also ample grounds for suspicion about improper motives, including the involvement of White House political aides and telephone calls from lawmakers to prosecutors about politically sensitive cases. The dishonest conduct of the Justice Department has only served to deepen suspicions, to underscore the importance of figuring out exactly what transpired here and to distinguish this situation from the Reno precedent.
and here is another article with more background
Time to Go, Mr. Gonzales
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, March 14, 2007“I believe in accountability,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales proclaimed yesterday at a news conference that was a self-serving masterpiece of passive voice and unpersuasive platitudes. “Like every CEO of a major organization, I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice. I acknowledge that mistakes were made here. I accept that responsibility. And my pledge to the American people is to find out what went wrong here, to access accountability and to make improvements so that the mistakes that occurred in this instance do not occur again in the future.”
Is there anyone left — seriously, is there a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — who has confidence in Gonzales’s capacity to fix this mess? Is there anyone who accepts Gonzales’s CEO analogy — and thinks that a sentient board of directors wouldn’t have fired him long ago?
Let’s assume Gonzales’s good faith: that he truly is upset about what happened on his watch, just as he was upset last week about the FBI’s cavalier mishandling of its authority to issue “national security letters,” and wants to make things right.
There is no reason to believe that he is capable of making a change. The portrait of the Gonzales Justice Department that emerges from the e-mails released yesterday, and from the attorney general’s own comments, is of an agency overseen by an absentee landlord, chronically clueless about what’s happening around him.
This is a man whose memory is so foggy that George W. Bush — not exactly Mr. Detail — has a sharper recollection of their conversations than the attorney general does. The president, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, told Gonzales that Republicans were complaining about prosecutors failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud. Gonzales doesn’t recall the conversation.
I’m sorry, is there somebody he’s paying more attention to than the president of the United States?
At his I’m-accountable-but-I-didn’t-know-anything news conference yesterday, Gonzales said he knew the White House had suggested canning all 93 U.S. attorneys, rejected that idea and then left things to his chief of staff. “I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on,” he said. “That’s basically what I knew as the attorney general.”
How reassuring. But, a reporter asked, how could it be that his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, was figuring out “which U.S. attorneys to . . . let go and you not know?”
Answer: “Well, again as — I accept responsibility for whatever happens here in this department. But I have 110,000 working in the department. Obviously, there are going to be decisions made that I’m not aware of all the time.”
Translation: “I’m going to tell you I’m responsible, because that’s what they tell me I have to say. But of course I’m not. It’s all Kyle Sampson’s fault. I’m hoping that if I say I’m accountable often enough, no one will actually hold me accountable.”
Ousting a group of top federal prosecutors isn’t some minor, inconsequential act. It’s the sort of thing that a responsible attorney general would be deeply immersed in. Gonzales’s depiction of his own marginality is the most damning evidence of his unfitness for the job.
The precise non-mistake mistake that Gonzales copped to yesterday was sharing “incomplete” — this is Gonzales-speak for wrong — information with Congress. Think about this: Gonzales first testified about the U.S. attorney firings on Jan. 19. His No. 2, Paul McNulty, testified on Feb. 6. Assistant Attorney General William Moschella testified March 6.
And it wasn’t until this week that Justice finally figured out it hadn’t figured out the whole story? If that’s true — and I’m not sure which would be worse — why should anyone believe this crowd is capable of getting its congressional story straight in the future?
Meantime, the pages of e-mails released yesterday show how — while Gonzales hummed happily above the fray — his lieutenants carefully choreographed the firings, down to making sure that the relevant senators were called at precisely the same time the ousted prosecutors were to be informed of their fates, and delaying the moment of truth until they left a meeting of federal prosecutors “to reduce chatter.”
When Arkansas senators balked at installing Karl Rove protege Tim Griffin in the U.S. attorney’s job there, Sampson recommended that the department “gum this to death.” If the senators ultimately balk, he said, “then we can tell them we’ll look for other candidates . . . and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in ‘good faith’ of course.” Of course.
In his now famous “overblown personnel matter” column in USA Today last week, Gonzales wrote, “While I am grateful for the public service of these seven U.S. attorneys, they simply lost my confidence.” (Or did he mean Kyle Sampson’s confidence?)
It’s time — past time — for the president to say the same, perhaps more quietly and more politely, about his friend, his counselor and his failed attorney general.