Perhaps naively, I still hold out hope that the Bush administration’s purge of U.S. Attorneys is a controversy that could turn into a real political problem for the White House.
A quick review, for those just joining us. Across the country, United States Attorneys are sometimes described as local attorneys general — each U.S. Attorney is the chief federal law enforcement officer within his or her local jurisdiction. There’s a pretty typical pattern for their tenures — a president nominates these federal prosecutors at the beginning of his term, and they serve until the next president.
As TPM Muckraker has been documenting for a couple of weeks, the Bush White House’s approach to these local federal law enforcement officers has been anything but typical. Several U.S. attorneys have been forced from their posts, replaced with another Bush appointee, despite some of them working on high-profile corruption cases. Paul Krugman has described this as “a pre-emptive strike against the gathering forces of justice.”
From the outset, one of the central questions is what role politics played in the process. A U.S. attorney in Arkansas, for example, was replaced with an opposition researcher for Karl Rove. The U.S. attorney for San Diego is being replaced after successfully prosecuting Duke Cunningham, despite the fact that the FBI believes her departure will likely undermine multiple ongoing investigations.
Alberto Gonzales refused to disclose how many prosecutors were replaced, but he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would “never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.” A new McClatchy report suggests otherwise.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is transforming the ranks of the nation’s top federal prosecutors by firing some and appointing conservative loyalists from the Bush administration’s inner circle who critics say are unlikely to buck Washington.
The newly appointed U.S. attorneys all have impressive legal credentials, but most of them have few, if any, ties to the communities they’ve been appointed to serve, and some have had little experience as prosecutors.
McClatchy’s Marisa Taylor and Greg Gordon also found some details that had been hidden before now.
The article lists there are nine new U.S. attorneys, all of whom have administration ties, and none of whom would comment on their controversial appointments. There are no well-known names on the list, but it’s worth noting that, among the list, there’s a Republican National Committee spokesman, a Federalist Society member, an Orrin Hatch aide, a Samuel Alito protege, and a few Alberto Gonzales aides.
What’s driving all of this? The most likely explanation is the consolidation of power.
The nine recent appointees identified by McClatchy Newspapers held high-level White House or Justice Department jobs, and most of them were handpicked by Gonzales under a little-noticed provision of the Patriot Act that became law in March.
With Congress now controlled by the Democrats, critics fear that in some cases Gonzales is trying to skirt the need for Senate confirmation by giving new U.S. attorneys interim appointments for indefinite terms. Some legal scholars contend that the administration pushed for the change in the Patriot Act as part of its ongoing attempt to expand the power of the executive branch, a charge that administration officials deny.
Being named a U.S. attorney “has become a prize for doing the bidding of the White House or administration,” said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who’s now a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “In the past, there had been a great deal of delegation to the local offices. Now, you have a consolidation of power in Washington.”
A Justice Department spokesman said it was “reckless” to suggest that politics had influenced the appointment process. Given the Bush gang’s conduct on this, I don’t think critics are the ones being “reckless” here.