We haven’t had any blockbuster revelations on the prosecutor purge scandal in a while, but National Journal’s Murray Waas and the LA Times have certainly shaken things up with revelations about a March 2006 memo in which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales delegated power to hire and fire senior political appointees at the Justice Department to Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides — who have since resigned because of their central roles in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys — extraordinary authority over the hiring and firing of most non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department. A copy of the order and other Justice Department records related to the conception and implementation of the order were provided to National Journal.
In the order, Gonzales delegated to his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, and his White House liaison “the authority, with the approval of the Attorney General, to take final action in matters pertaining to the appointment, employment, pay, separation, and general administration” of virtually all non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department, including all of the department’s political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation. Monica Goodling became White House liaison in April 2006, the month after Gonzales signed the order.
The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed.
Let’s unpack this a bit. Based on this March ’06 memo, the DoJ’s employment decisions basically were handed over to Sampson and Goodling, to the exclusion of the department’s senior leadership. Waas’ source, identified as a “senior executive branch official familiar with the delegation of authority,” said the point of this was to “make the department more responsive to the political side of the White House and to do it in such a way that people would not know it was going on.”
This does not mean Sampson and Goodling were in a position to directly hire and fire U.S. Attorneys — Gonzales’ order dealt with officials above career level, but below Senate-confirmed positions — but given the circumstances, their personnel power was still of tremendous importance, particularly as it relates to corruption prosecutions.
A senior Justice Department official, who did not know of Gonzales’s delegation of authority until contacted by National Journal, said that it posed a serious threat to the integrity of the criminal-justice system because it gave Sampson, Goodling, and the White House control over the hiring of senior officials in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, which oversees all politically sensitive public corruption cases, at the same time that they held authority to hire and fire U.S. attorneys.
“If you are controlling who is going to be a U.S. attorney and who isn’t going to be,… firing them outside the traditional process… and the same people are deciding who are going to be their supervisors back in Washington… there is too much of a potential for mischief, for abuse,” the official said.
In other words, Gonzales took himself out of the loop intentionally, allowing the White House’s political office and some DoJ hacks to call the shots.
Of course, distorting the Justice Department like this isn’t necessarily illegal, but Alberto Gonzales did talk to the Senate Judiciary Committee at length about the department’s employment practices — and neglected to mention any of this.
Not surprisingly, Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said the secret order “would seem to be evidence of an effort to hardwire control over law enforcement by White House political operatives,” and demanded that it be turned over to congressional investigators immediately. “This memorandum should have been turned over to Senate and House committees as part of requests made in ongoing investigations,” Leahy said. “I expect the Department of Justice to immediately provide Congress with full information about this troubling decision as well as any other related documents they have failed to turn over to date.”
Questions to consider: Who got hired/fired as a result of the memo, and how does it relate to corruption investigations? If/when Goodling testifies, will she identify Karl Rove as the one calling the shots? Will Gonzales tell Leahy that he “forgot” about the memo during his multi-hour hearing?
In other purge scandal news:
* The NYT notes the partisan pattern of U.S. Attorney prosecutions.
* Josh Marshall has more on Thomas Heffelfinger in Minneapolis and Todd Graves in Kansas City, neither of whom are considered part of the eight, but both of whom appear to have been pushed out of their U.S. Attorney jobs for dubious reasons.
* Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, Gonzales’ original scapegoat, is distancing himself from the purge and his earlier testimony.
* And Anonymous Liberal found an interesting gem from the latest document dump: a memo from Goodling that appears to instruct DoJ officials to delete documents.
Stay tuned.