Red State: “There seems to be an awful lot of selective outrage here. I don’t see why this dust up should be all that embarrassing for the White House or Republicans. Furthermore, I don’t see why the White House should be answering any questions about this matter at all, from Congress or from anywhere else. Soon after his inauguration in 1993, the Clinton Justice Department fired every Federal [tag]prosecutor[/tag] in the Department of Justice. Every one. No reasons were given or required.”
The Corner (Tim Graham): “[tag]Gonzales[/tag] should not be judged without considering the massive media double-standard on this puny scandal. Here’s your breakfast drinking game: Have a drink every time the networks mention that Bush fired eight U.S. attorneys, and Clinton fired all 93 U.S. attorneys in 1993. It’s a drinking game in which you’ll never get drunk.”
Macsmind: “It’s utterly facinating [sic] to see all the hoopty-do about seven prosecutors fired, which is drop in a bucket compared to the ‘Great Purge of ’93.'”
Scared Monkeys: “[T]his same media remained mum on the topic when Bill Clinton decided to fire all 93 US Attorneys when he assumed the Presidency under an ethical cloud. And during this period we remember that he always referred to Hillary as his Co-President. So traditional media, why don’t one of you suck it up and ask the Junior Senator from New York the question on why it was proper for you and your co-President husband to fire ALL the US Attorneys and Bush to fire 7 with cause?”
And on and on it goes. They just don’t seem to understand how wrong they are.
For what it’s worth, this McClatchy report takes on the myth.
The Bush administration and its defenders like to point out that President Bush isn’t the first president to fire U.S. attorneys and replace them with loyalists.
While that’s true, the current case is different. Mass firings of U.S. attorneys are fairly common when a new president takes office, but not in a second-term administration. Prosecutors are usually appointed for four-year terms, but they are usually allowed to stay on the job if the president who appointed them is re-elected.
Even as they planned mass firings by the Bush White House, Justice Department officials acknowledged it would be unusual for the president to oust his own appointees. Although Bill Clinton ordered the wholesale removal of U.S. attorneys when he took office to remove Republican holdovers, his replacement appointees stayed for his second term.
Ronald Reagan also kept his appointees for his second term.
“In some instances, Presidents Reagan and Clinton may have been pleased with the work of the U.S. attorneys, who, after all, they had appointed,” Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, speculated in a 2006 memo outlining Bush’s alternative approach. “In other instances, Presidents Reagan and Clinton may simply have been unwilling to commit the resources necessary to remove the U.S. attorneys.”
And CAP mentioned the myth is its daily talking-points feature this morning.
Last week in Little Rock, Rove claimed the attorney firings were “normal and ordinary” because Clinton had done the same thing when he replaced all 93 U.S. Attorneys in 1993. The difference, as former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta told the Progress Report, is that “the Clinton administration never fired federal prosecutors as pure political retribution.” The Clinton administration, like the H.W. Bush and Reagan administrations before it, asked for all U.S. Attorneys to resign at the beginning of their respective presidential terms. […]
The Congressional Research Service has confirmed how unprecedented these firings are … It found that of 486 U.S. attorneys confirmed since 1981, perhaps no more than three were forced out in similar ways — three in 25 years, compared with seven in recent months.” (Read the full CRS report here.) The new emails show the Justice Department knew what they were doing had never been done before. “In recent memory, during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, Presidents Reagan and Clinton did not seek to remove and replace U.S. Attorneys to serve indefinitely under the holdover provision,” Samson wrote.
Note to the right: please come up with something else. You’re not only embarrassing yourself, you’re driving the reality-based community batty.
Update: [tag]Hillary Clinton[/tag] is doing her part in setting the record straight, too.
“This is a great difference,” she said. “When a new president comes in, a new president gets to clean house. It is not done on case-by-case basis where you didn’t do something that some senator or member of Congress told you to do in terms of investigation into opponents. It is ‘Let’s start afresh.’ Every president has done that.
“This happening now with this administration is actually quite rare,” she went on. “There’s been some research done that concluded it’s hardly ever happens and it happened with so many people and it apparently was going to happen with more. We now are hearing stories that basially the White House wanted to change all the [tag]US Attorneys[/tag] for political and personal reasons. I think this raises serious questions.”