By late March, panic and paralysis had taken over the Justice Department. “You have no idea,” said one Justice official, “how bad it is here.” By one news account, the DoJ faced “open warfare,” with officials taking sides between AG Gonzales and Deputy AG McNulty.
With that in mind, I suppose it stands to reason that Gonzales would decide to throw McNulty, who resigned yesterday, under the bus.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday he relied on his resigning deputy more than any other aide to decide which U.S. attorneys should be fired last year. […]
“You have to remember, at the end of the day, the recommendations reflected the views of the deputy attorney general. He signed off on the names,” Gonzales told reporters at a National Press Club forum in Washington. “And he would know better than anyone else, anyone in this room, anyone — again, the deputy attorney general would know best about the qualifications and the experiences of the United States attorneys community, and he signed off on the names.”
I can’t say I’m surprised — Gonzales gave up on the possibility of shame quite a while ago — but even reporters realize that the AG is playing fast and loose here. The AP noted that DoJ documents “show that [McNulty] was not closely involved in picking all the U.S. attorneys who were put on the list — a job mostly driven by two Gonzales staffers with little prosecutorial experience.”
I also loved Gonzales’ argument that McNulty “signed off on the names.” That’s true, but so did Gonzales.
Obviously, the Bush gang (which certainly includes Gonzales) wants nothing more than to find a high-ranking scapegoat, but McNulty isn’t it.
This is not to say McNulty is free from responsibility. For one thing, he allowed himself to be spun and misinformed, which in turn led him to offer bogus testimony to Congress. For another, as Andrew Cohen noted, McNulty was in a position to stand up for the “independence and authority of the prosecutors who were fired,” but didn’t.
But then there’s the broader context.
McNulty was “largely left out of the loop when Gonzales” in early 2005 ordered his chief of staff to identify top prosecutors for dismissal. McNulty has said he was not aware of the plans until last fall, “two months before the firings were executed.” McNulty told one fired attorney that he’d had only “limited input” in the firing process. Former Attorney General William Barr said recently, “This doesn’t seem to be a stink bomb of [McNulty’s] making. … I’d hate to see him made the scapegoat; the main screwups were not his.”
Schumer has expressed a similar sentiment, stating a few weeks ago, “No one has said McNulty was at the center of this.” Commenting on McNulty’s dismissal, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) said yesterday that key questions remain unanswered. “We continue to wait for answers: Who developed the list of the U.S. attorneys to be fired? How did U.S. attorneys end up on that list? What happened to the public corruption cases those U.S. attorneys were investigating at the time of their departures?” And as Congress seeks the answers to those questions, it will undoubtedly call upon Paul McNulty to help provide answers. “As we press on with our investigation, we look forward to his cooperation,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI).
Gonzales is still trying to pin the blame everywhere else, but his arguments, like his defense of the scandal, are baseless.