About a month ago, the Justice Department was scrambling to come up with a coherent excuse for having fired former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. They came up with a weak accusation: Iglesias was guilty of “absentee landlordism,” because he had to take 40 days of annual duty in the naval reserve. (The excuse is causing the Justice Department some legal headaches now.)
But as it turns out, if the Bush gang were really worried about identifying (and firing) U.S. Attorneys who haven’t been at their desks enough, they would have a big problem with this.
A half-dozen sitting U.S. attorneys also serve as aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales or are assigned other Washington postings, performing tasks that take them away from regular duties in their districts for months or even years at a time, according to officials and department records.
Acting Associate Attorney General William W. Mercer, for example, has been effectively absent from his job as U.S. attorney in Montana for nearly two years — prompting the chief federal judge in Billings to demand his removal and call Mercer’s office “a mess.”
Another U.S. attorney, Michael J. Sullivan of Boston, has been in Washington for the past six months as acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He is awaiting confirmation to head the agency permanently while still juggling his responsibilities in Massachusetts.
The number of U.S. attorneys pulling double duty in Washington is the focus of growing concern from other prosecutors and from members of the federal bench, according to legal experts and government officials.
“I can’t think of a time when there’s been this many U.S. attorneys doing double duty at one time,” said Dennis Boyd, executive director of the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys, which represents current federal prosecutors.
Given the rationalizations used for the prosecutor purge, this is more than a little entertaining.
The DoJ’s William Moschella told Congress last month, “Quite frankly, U.S. attorneys are hired to run the office, not their first assistants.” In other words, if a prosecutor isn’t at his or her designated desk, he or she isn’t worthy of support and needs to be replaced.
Unless, that is, Gonzales & Co. arbitrarily decide to let their first assistants run the offices.
Mercer currently wears two hats as the U.S. attorney in Montana and as third-in-command at Justice, behind Gonzales and his deputy, Paul J. McNulty. Mercer has been pulling double duty since June 2005, when he was first appointed to a different executive position at Justice headquarters.
His regular absence from the U.S. attorney’s office in Billings has caused severe friction between Mercer and U.S. District Chief Judge Donald W. Molloy, a Clinton appointee. Molloy wrote a letter to Gonzales in October 2005 demanding that Mercer be replaced.
Molloy wrote that Mercer’s absence had led to “a lack of leadership” in the Montana office and created “untoward difficulties for the court” and for career prosecutors. The judge also questioned whether Mercer complied with residency requirements.
Gonzales wrote back the next month that Mercer was handling both jobs admirably, and suggested that Mercer’s absence would be short-lived.
Relations between Mercer and Molloy have not improved since. Molloy berated Mercer during a court hearing last year, accusing him of bringing weak cases to court to pump up statistics and telling him: “You have no credibility — none.”
“Your lawyers are not getting their briefs in on time,” Molloy said. “You’re in Washington, D.C., and you ought to be here in Montana doing your work. Your office is a mess.”
What was that the White House was saying about firing U.S. Attorneys for “performance” reasons?
And speaking of the purge scandal, a bipartisan group of lawmakers suspect that the Justice Department is intentionally withholding materials it was supposed to have disclosed.
Four senators said Monday that they suspected that the Justice Department had failed to turn over all relevant documents related to the dismissals of eight United States attorneys.
The department has released more than 3,000 pages of e-mail messages and other files. But, the senators wrote in a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, “We are concerned that additional documents relevant to the committee’s investigations are missing or have been withheld.”
The letter expressed skepticism about whether lawmakers had all the material they needed to evaluate the motives for the removals and raised questions on the scope and methods used to assemble the material.
Among the missing documents the senators mentioned was a chart cited in a Monica Goodling email and biographies of each U.S. Attorney prepared for a Gonzales briefing book.
For some reason, senators seem to believe the Justice Department is not cooperating in good faith. Go figure.