It wasn’t about ‘job performance’

March 22, 2007

Just yesterday, I noted that not all of the purged prosecutors were equal. The administration may have had legitimate grounds for dismissal for a couple of the purged prosecutors, a fact that only helps highlight the weak reasoning for the others. The LA Times, for example, reported that in San Francisco, where Kevin Ryan was fired, “the office has become the most fractured office in the nation, morale has fallen to the point that it is harming our prosecutorial efforts and [Ryan] has lost the confidence of many of the career prosecutors who are leaving the office.”

A fairly compelling explanation for his ouster, right? Well, it would be, except Ryan’s professional troubles had nothing to do with why the Bush gang decided to fire him.

The “company man” hired and fired by the Bush administration as U.S. attorney in San Francisco was a loyal Republican the administration wanted to keep on — until it appeared he could become a public relations liability….

Despite his problems, which were well documented in legal newspapers, Justice officials wanted to keep Ryan on, even as they plotted the firings of other U.S. attorneys. It was only when a Democratic judge threatened to go to Congress to raise a public fuss over an excoriating written evaluation of Ryan’s office that Ryan was put on the termination list, according to e-mails released by the White House.

Ryan’s critics persuaded Justice that his firing “could avoid the release of documents” highly critical of his management style, Little said.

Consider what this tells us: a U.S. Attorney’s on-the-job performance, when shown to be problematic, wasn’t even enough to get him fired. As Kevin Drum put it, “[It] kinda makes you think that neither poor performance nor policy differences really had anything to do with any of this, doesn’t it?”

Yep.

We’re left with Kevin Ryan, who was fired to avoid his poor performance becoming public; Margaret Chiara, another loyalist who appeared to have genuine management problems; and five more who were fired for unclear reasons — but who all seem to have shared the fatal defect of prosecuting too many Republicans and not enough Democrats. (Plus one more who was fired to make way for a friend of Karl Rove to take his spot.)

In other purge-scandal news:

* USA Today reported today, “Three of the eight federal prosecutors ousted by the Justice Department as poor performers ranked in the top 10 for prosecutions and convictions by the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys, an analysis of court records shows…. A fourth former prosecutor, Daniel Bogden of Nevada, ranked among the top third of all U.S. attorneys during four of the past five years, according to federal data maintained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.”

* Yesterday, Tony Snow said he’d been “led to believe” that the Justice Department had a good explanation for the 18-day gap in purge documents from November. And what is this explanation? Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department, told the NYT, “To the extent there was a lull in communications concerning the U.S. attorney issues, it reflects the fact that we have found no responsive documents from that time period, which included the Thanksgiving holiday.” (I love the word “lull” as a euphemism for “gap.”)

* Speaking of the 18-day gap, Paul Kiel reported on one email from the relevant time period, in which DoJ official Michael Elston forwards a review document concerning the Northern District of California to another DoJ employee and asks that it be printed. Doesn’t seem like a big deal.

* ThinkProgress found another, between Kyle Sampson and Brent Ward, the porn prosecutor. In the emails, Ward complains about resistance from several U.S. Attorneys to prosecuting obscenity cases, problems that the Bush administration now claims are responsible for the firings of prosecutors Daniel Bogden in Nevada and Paul Charlton in Arizona.

* Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hosted Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch, Jon Kyl, John Cornyn, and Jeff Sessions for a lunch meeting yesterday.

* The WaPo ran a helpful rundown of how the legal process will unfold if Congress sends the White House subpoenas, and the Bush gang resists.

* And Josh Marshall ran a great big-picture item last night.

Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It’s a direct attack on the rule of law.

This much is already clear in the record. And we’re now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president’s perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.

It’s yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we’ve been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown. At most points in our history the idea that an Attorney General could stay in office after having overseen such an effort would be unthinkable. The most telling part of this episode is that they’re not even really denying the wrongdoing. They’re ignoring the point or at least pleading ‘no contest’ and saying it’s okay.

Stay tuned.

Yeah, there are two things in this world that smell like fish – fish and the Bush Administration. This WH has really stunk up our nation’s sense of purpose and identity. We now invade other countries with no good reason. We now torture instead of upholding the ideal of due process. We now execute the law for political gain. We have been hoodwinked by the Rovean sorts that occupy our oval office for far too long now. Get busy and contact Congressional representatives to further our pursuit of the truth on this most grave issue facing our beloved democracy. I am beginning to see that the people in the WH may be operating a criminal enterprise. It doesn’t sound so far fetched when one takes a look at the team roster for the WH which includes the likes of Eliot Abhrams and Adm. Poindexter. What throw backs these two are. I can only guess that this Administration has given safe haven to other ne’erdowell types also. May our Constitution prevail. May this WH be prosecuted to the fullest under our laws of the land. -Kevo

  • the legal analyst on cbs this morning (i don’t remember his name) was saying that he felt bush had the advantage if this went to court because the make-up of the courts has changed so much since other presidents had their executive privilege claims turned down. can someone with a better legal background than i have please comment on this? thanks.

  • As was made evident repeatedly, the Corleone family was able to function because it had judges and politicians in its back pockets, stooges who might otherwise be okay but on whom the godfather could count when push came to shove. Sounds a lot like the Bush Crime Family.

    Hard to come up with a more disgusting group than Hatch, Kyl, and Cornyn. Hard to imagine as a lunch bunch for Abu Gonzo, until you Google “Orrin Hatch, Jon Kyl, John Cornyn” and the first item up is “The Senate Judiciary Committee”.

  • Be sure to read the WashPost’s moronic editorial about this today. It may have been written by Broder in that they make sure they blame both parties.

  • Here is an idea for someone with some time on their hands. Compile a list of people dismissed from BushCo for failure to preform. Exclude from the list any scapegoats. My guess is that you won’t need much more than one side of a cocktail napkin to compile the list.

  • Josh Marshall is right that some on the right are hoping to mire us down in matters of process and deflect attention from the larger issue that BushCo. attempted to — and in some cases apparently succeeded — in manipulating justice. As this proceeds, we can’t lose sight of the fact that the minutia concerning the firing of individual prosecutors merely serve as supporting evidence of tampering with the courts.

    There is, of course, an even larger issue that the press and our elected officials aren’t ready to mention — use of the judiciary to influence elections and create the long-term Republican control of government that Rove, DeLay and others sought. Going after state and local Democrats aggressively on questionable charges, would have weakened the party at the local level, where the real work of elections is done and where future candidates gain experience. Whether charges stuck or not, the mere indictment of large numbers of Democrats would have tainted the party in the eyes of the public. Not going after Republicans would have made them appear to be upstanding by comparison. How perfectly Rovian.

  • Ironic that those who would so willingly torture others are now themselves suffering the drip drip drip of chinese water torture in the daily dripple of relevations resulting from unexpected vigorous oversight by the opposition party.

    It’s good to know that karma is still alive and well in the universe.

  • Did Bush Firing Of Attorney Have To Do With Turning A Blind Eye To A Pedophile?

    People In Washington State Are Wondering.

    http://soundpolitics.com/archives/008252.html

    Perhaps there are reasons behind why Bush fired these people. Perhaps these people are not as innocent as the Democrats are trying to portray them as being.

    • Comments are closed.