The ongoing saga of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales being at the eye of a series of political storms underscores one conclusion:
The country owes Republican conservatives a big, fat “thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!” for their successful efforts at batting down early political feelers from the Bush White House that Gonazles might be a good candidate to sit on the Supreme Court.
When history (versus megasecond blog posts such as this) is written, it’s virtually certain that Gonzales will be NOT be viewed as an independent-thinking attorney who played devil’s advocate with his boss, or someone who was respected as a solid AG and gained the respect of lawyers belonging to both parties. Rather, he is emerging every inch as controversial as President Bill Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno, who was thoroughly detested by Republicans.
Rather than an Attorney General with spine, he’s developing an image of an Attorney General who knows how to bow to whatever his boss wants.
The latest scandal — which some call a scandal about a crime that was not committed — is likely to further soil Gonzales’ already-blemished image. Just look at some of the media coverage and editorials.
Time and again, President Bush and his team have assured Americans that they needed new powers to prevent another attack by an implacable enemy. Time and again, Americans have discovered that these powers were not being used to make them safer, but in the service of Vice President Dick Cheney’s vision of a presidency so powerful that Congress and the courts are irrelevant, or Karl Rove’s fantasy of a permanent Republican majority.
In firing the prosecutors and replacing them without Senate approval, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took advantage of a little-noticed provision that the administration and its Republican enablers in Congress had slipped into the 2006 expansion of the Patriot Act. The ostensible purpose was to allow the swift interim replacement of a United States attorney who was, for instance, killed by terrorism.
But these firings had nothing to do with national security — or officials’ claims that the attorneys were fired for poor performance. This looks like a political purge, pure and simple, and President Bush and his White House are in the thick of it.
The most damning piece in the Times‘ reporting on Gonzales comes here in this article with this passage:
The extensive consultations between the Justice Department and White House over which United States attorneys should be ousted started as early as March 2005, the e-mail messages show.
That is when Mr. Sampson, Mr. Gonzales’s aide [who has since resigned], sent a document to Ms. Miers ranking the nation’s federal prosecutors.
“Bold=Recommend retaining; strong U.S. Attorneys who have produced, managed well, and exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general,� the e-mail message from Mr. Sampson said. “Strikeout=Recommend removing; weak U.S. Attorneys who had been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against administration initiatives, etc.�
Jay Carney of Time’s Swampland blog applauds the blogosphere…and one blogger in particular:
My hat is off. Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo and everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings, and who dug around and kept writing about them while Iglesias decided whether to talk to the press or go quietly on to his next job, deserve tremendous credit.
When this story first surfaced, I thought the Bush White House and Justice Department were guilty of poorly executed acts of crass political patronage. I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were “concerned”, but this was not a priority. The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the MSM along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much worse than I’d first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire.
Washington Post offers via Alexander Cohen, in part I of The Case Against Alberto Gonzales, starts off with this:
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is the 80th attorney general of the United States and if recent events in the law and at the Justice Department are any indication, he is rapidly staking a claim to being among the worst. To test that claim and evaluate the man who is not just nominally called the “nation’s top lawyer,” we must answer three questions. To what extent did Gonzales’ public record before taking office give us clues about what sort of Attorney General he has turned out to be? Has he so far been up to the task as it is ideally defined? And, finally, does he deserve to continue to serve in office?
Read it all.
Cohen is CBS News’ legal affairs analyst and he is even more blunt on their site:
Are you surprised by today’s front-page news that the White House was “deeply involved� in the firing of federal prosecutors and that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales appears to have obediently complied with a request by the President to get rid of U.S. Attorneys who had come under criticism from Republican politicians? You shouldn’t be.This sorry episode is just the latest in a long string of developments wherein the Justice Department, under Gonzales’ leadership, is unwilling or unable to exercise any sort of independence from the White House. This morning I spoke with Stanley Kutler, an eminent legal historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He told me that today’s news “typifies� a long-running problem that has tainted many an attorney general during the course of the nation’s history. When an attorney general is politically or personally beholden to a President, Kutler told me, and when the Justice Department is run from out of the White House, you’ve got trouble.
We’ve indeed got trouble. Few attorneys general in recent history have been more beholden to their President than Gonzales is to President George W. Bush. In fact, two years ago, when asked by the Academy of Achievement to list his role models, Gonzales listed his mother, his father, and the President as the three people to whom he owed the most. This would be more charming if the Attorney General had during the past two years stood up to his hero– on domestic surveillance, on Guantanamo Bay, on protecting good federal prosecutors—instead of simply defending or justifying White House policies and practices.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times‘ piece perfectly articulates why Gonzales — and the Bush administration — are in trouble (again).
The scandal stems from the Bush administration’s changing answers to congressional inquiries into why the U.S. attorneys were fired. At one time, former White House Counsel Harriett E. Miers suggested that all 93 U.S. attorneys be fired. Gonzales said today that he objected to that proposal, calling it “a bad idea, disruptive.”
Instead, he assigned his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, to evaluate “who was weak, where we could do better.”
The attorney general faulted the Justice Department’s “system of communication,” saying the eight fired prosecutors should have been told why they were dismissed. But he added that the dismissals were justified.
“I stand by the decision. I think it was the right decision,” Gonzales said.
White House Counselor Dan Bartlett said the president “ultimately signed off” on the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired, but did not add or subtract from the list. Noting that President Bush “has all the confidence in the world” in Gonzales, Bartlett said the president believes removing the U.S. attorneys “was the right decision.”
What can you see in all of this?
(1) Even if he stays in office, Gonzales is dead political and judicial meat. It’s hard to image him EVER being appointed to a court — even by a Republican administration.
(2) This scandal fits a pattern, a piece of a puzzle with some of the other pieces including the uproars over U.S. ports being controlled by a company in Dubai (where Halliburton will now move), the handling of the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, and other issues. There is a perception in the land that a good ‘ol boy network operates within the Bush administration where jobs are filled on the basis of who’ll go along to get along with The Man At The Top and some folks can get what they want merely by making a few phone calls to their buddies working for GWB.
(3) The Gonzales controversy coupled with the Libby trial will further decrease the White House’s clout and credibility in Congress and not help its standing in the polls. At best, backlash to the administration under fire could rally the GOP base. But these two news stories won’t increase support among independent voters. And Democrats giving this administration the benefit of the doubt now seems gone forever.
(4) The way the Gonzales controversy is playing out with demands in Congress for hearings and increasing calls for his resignation underscore the importance of DIVIDED government…no matter which party controls the White House. Oversight and the demand for explanations is the way to find out what occured and if necessary set boundaries. What would have happened to lingering questions if this story had broken when the GOP controlled both houses?
UPDATE:
–Various newspapers are now calling for Gonazles’ resignation, Editor and Publisher reports.
–Conservative blogger Ed Morrisey has a MUST READ POST that needs to be read in full. Here’s just his update that he put on later (but read it ALL):
Yes, Clinton fired all 93 federal prosecutors at the start of his term. Yes, it interfered with investigations in process. Most of them, if not all of them, were approaching the expirations of their terms of office, however, and Clinton’s unprecedented act was mainly that he “fired” them without having nominated most of their replacements. US Attorneys serve four-year terms coincidental to the presidency, and are retained or dismissed at the end of their terms at the pleasure of whomever occupies the Oval Office. It is unusual to sack US Attorneys mid-term, unprecedented to do so with eight of them at a time, and in the case of Iglesias, to do so with one ranked by the White House as a high performer but whose home-state Senator pushed for termination because of impatience in indicting activists from the opposition party for corruption.
I’m not saying that the firings were illegal, but they were certainly strange, and politically stupid. And, yes, very worthy of criticism — as have been Gonzales’ attempts to explain them away. And since when do we accept the Clinton standard for ethical conduct, anyway?
Here’s a cross section of weblog opinion:
One quick digression, for those of you who may not have been tracking this slow-burning scandal, or who may not be clear on its significance: Federal prosecutors are supposed to be insulated from partisan political pressures. They are virtually never forced out of their jobs; once appointed, they traditionally stay until a new president arrives to clean house. Indeed, the Congressional Research Service has found that, of 486 prosecutors appointed since 1981, only 3 have been forced out in midterm, apparently for egregious performance reasons. Yet now we have eight new firings all at once, in the middle of Bush’s second term, virtually none of them for performance reasons (even though Gonzales’ department did claim at first that the eight victims had earned poor job evaluations, but that argument has turned out to be a lie as well).
Anyway, Gonzales met the press today, took questions for roughly two minutes, then left the scene faster than a hit and run driver. Before departing, however, he exhibited all the symptoms of a cornered Washington pol. Which is to say, he employed all the classic defenses.
And he gives them to you (so read it).
–Crooks and Liars has the video here and adds: “You gotta love how they’re blaming this all on Harriet Miers now that she’s out of the picture. Loyalty truly is a one-way street in Bush World. However, he made clear he isn’t leaving.”
—Red State: “I ask again, where is the scandal here? Are we as Republicans and conservatives going to submit to the fact that there was wrongdoing just because the Democrats and the media say so? Rather, I suspect that this whole push by the Democrats is to make Federal prosecutors gun shy about investigating Democrats. There, I said it. It’s all political backside covering in my estimation.?
[As] I suggested yesterday, the President is still going to need to make a higher level firing if he even wants a chance of saving one of his two closest and longest-serving advisors — Rove and Gonzales, firing one to save the other — and even that might not be enough to stave off further calls for investigation and culpability.
For the first time in the last six years, there is now direct proof, documentary proof, that could implicate George W. Bush in some of the widespread impropriety within his administration. And though the Bush White House may believe in the at best controversial axiom that if the President does it, it’s not illegal, there is more than enough precedent in American history for holding a President accountable for his own actions.
—James Joyner: “So we have yet another case of “the cover-up is worse than the crimeâ€? when, yet again, no crime has been committed. Regardless of what comes out in the end, I hereby reiterate my longstanding position that I’m tired of faux apologies. “Mistakes were made,â€? “I’m sorry if anyone was offended,â€? and all the rest are much more annoying than silence.”
—TBogg: “The difference between Rove and Sampson is that Rove always manages to find someone else to take the fall for him…like, oh, Kyle Sampson. On this note, imagine the fun we would be having if Miers or Gonzalez had made it to the Supreme Court.”
—Dr. Steven Taylor on Gonzale’s press conference: “Ok, so he acknowledges that there was/is a problem, that he accepts responsibility, but that he really doesn’t know exactly what happened. This strikes me as unhelpful.”
—Digby has a must read theory on all of this. Here’s this for a tiny taste (and read the rest): “I have speculated that Rove was pursuing a phony voter fraud strategy for 2006 and was thwarted by his boy’s catastrophic governance and some US Attorneys who refused to file charges.”
–The ever-original Heretik offers yet another post that needs to be read in full. Here’s a tiny portion:”With the list of evasions now coming out of Alberto Gonzales mouth, you might think it was 1973 or 1974 all over again. Politics and partisanship make a pathetic partnership. Oh, and toss in some paranoia. Power loves only power and those in power hate to see it go. Mistakes were made. Screw you. Whatever the poor level of performance in his job, Gonzales now is a rich mine for quotes.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.