One of the missing elements of the prosecutor purge scandal is the overwrought GOP defense. Anytime one of these scandals pop up involving the Bush White House, there’s a coordinated and aggressive defense involving Republican lawmakers on the Hill, Fox News, talk radio, and the blogs. They let conservatives know that the questions, no matter the controversy, have no merit. When that fails, they blame Clinton. When that fails, they change the subject.
But we’re not hearing much of a defense right now. The scandal keeps getting bigger, and implicating a larger group of administration and congressional officials, and the response never seems to come. The only high-profile Republicans we’ve been hearing from are Alberto Gonzales, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), and unfortunately for them, none has been able to articulate a coherent explanation for what’s transpired.
Indeed, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said during a hearing yesterday that “if the allegations are correct, there has been serious misconduct in what has occurred.”
I suspect that isn’t what the White House wanted to hear from a leading GOP lawmaker.
But, really, what are they going to say? What’s the defense? Last week, the House Judiciary Committee agreed to issue subpoenas to the fired U.S. Attorneys, but in protest, every Republican member of the Committee boycotted the vote. The Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Lamar Smith (Tex.), later called the session “political grandstanding.”
But that’s not a defense. Respected federal prosecutors are fired for political purposes, there’s evidence of congressional interference in a criminal probe, there’s evidence the Department of Justice may have threatened the prosecutors, the White House played a significant role in this mess, an untold number of administration officials may have lied to Congress, Republican lawmakers can’t keep their stories straight, and at least a few congressional ethics rules appear to have been violated. The GOP is going to have to do better than complain about “grandstanding.”
Apparently, it’s a challenge.
Slate’s Emily Bazelon offered this entertaining take after yesterday’s Senate hearing.
The Republican senators came up with only a scattershot defense. Specter questioned whether the phone calls Iglesias and McKay received from their home state politicians were actually threatening. This mostly gave the former prosecutors an opportunity to elaborate.
Sen. John Kyl of Arizona complained that since only Cummins has been replaced by a Bush favorite — J. Timothy Griffin, who used to work for Karl Rove — there was no evidence that the administration’s desire to install political cronies was behind the firings.
Jeff Sessions of Alabama did himself no favors by attacking Carol Lam, a former U.S. attorney from the southern district of California, for her office’s low number of gun cases. “It’s a zero-sum game,” Lam snapped back, citing her efforts to go after, um, big-time border troubles like drug and illegal-immigrant smugglers. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina reminded the ex-USAs that they’d been in office since 2001 and 2002. “Those are long stints,” he said, adding that he believes in “cycling people through.”
Maybe so, but that hasn’t been the Bush administration’s explanation for the firings.
“Cycling people through”? No president has ever fired eight U.S. Attorneys at one time. Coincidentally, there just so happens to have been a political motivation for each of the purged prosecutors. These eight weren’t just been “cycled through” for some new people; they were targeted specifically because their work was politically inconvenient for the administration.
The fact that Republicans can’t explain this away only helps prove how damaging the scandal has become.