For the past several weeks, the Bush administration offered a simple explanation for an unprecedented purge of U.S. Attorneys nationwide: the prosecutors’ on-the-job performance just wasn’t good enough, so the Justice Department fired them. All along it seemed obvious that the White House’s political agenda played a role, but the Bush gang denied any White House involvement at all.
Yesterday, that story changed a bit, but the explanation still doesn’t work.
The White House approved the firings of seven U.S. attorneys late last year after senior Justice Department officials identified the prosecutors they believed were not doing enough to carry out President Bush’s policies on immigration, firearms and other issues, White House and Justice Department officials said yesterday.
The list of prosecutors was assembled last fall, based largely on complaints from members of Congress, law enforcement officials and career Justice Department lawyers, administration officials said.
One of the complaints came from Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), who specifically raised concerns with the Justice Department last fall about the performance of then-U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, according to administration officials and Domenici’s office.
See? Politics, schmolitics — these prosecutors were rogue U.S. Attorneys taking on a wacky agenda like prosecuting political corruption when they were supposed to be tackling immigration. That’s why, for the first time in the history of the job, eight federal prosecutors were fired at once, even in the midst of ongoing criminal investigations. Right.
Apparently, as this controversy has been simmering for over a month, it just occurred to the White House to come up with this rationalization defense now. Given the lead time, I would have hoped that could come up with something more believable.
First, there’s ample evidence that politics alone drove the firing process.
[A]t least three of the eight fired attorneys were told by a superior they were being forced to resign to make jobs available for other Bush appointees, according to a former senior Justice Department official knowledgeable about their cases. That stands in contradiction to administration claims that the firings were related either to job performance or policy differences. A fourth U.S. attorney was told by a top Justice Department official that the dismissal in that attorney’s case was not necessarily related to job performance.
Similarly, the Iglesias example is pretty obviously an instance in which partisan concerns were paramount.
The new explanation for the purge is surprisingly weak, but nevertheless telling. The first explanation the Bush gang came up with was debunked as nonsense, so they’re moving on to Option #2 — the White House was involved, but the purge was innocuous and policy-driven.
But as Josh Marshall noted, that doesn’t quite explain what happened.
If this whole business was about US attorneys not implementing White House policy on immigration and firearms enforcement, why all the secrecy about it?
The White House didn’t let members of Congress know what they were doing when they did it. When called on it in an open hearing recently Deputy AG Paul McNulty said the US Attorneys were fired for performance issues. When called on the apparent falsity of those claims, it became a matter of policy disagreements. Again, if the US attorneys were canned for not following administration policy, why was this fact withheld even from the fired US Attorneys themselves? Remember, when called on December 7th and informed that they must resign, apparently none were given any explanation for their ousters.
Here’s the funny thing. Of all the reasons an administration might have to fire serving US attorneys, a willful refusal to follow the administration’s law enforcement policies would seem to be a pretty good one. Given the fact that so many of the fired prosecutors were also in the midst of major public corruption investigations, you’d think they’d be more forthcoming with this exculpating explanation. Even more so when you consider that one of the fired US Attorneys was the target of two sitting members of Congress trying to pressure him to subvert justice to alter the outcome of a 2006 House race.
Lots of potential for misunderstanding. And yet the White House has been so resistant to revealing this exculpating explanation until now.
Exactly. The Bush gang is copping to a lesser offense, which a) contradicts the earlier defenses; and b) falls apart under scrutiny.
What we’re left with is a good ol’ fashioned cover-up. Administration officials approved a purge of corruption-investigating prosecutors, and undercut ongoing cases in the process. This is troublesome, but legal. They then, however, tried to hide their decisions and misled Congress about it.
Chances are, the Bush gang was used to just doing what it pleased, expecting to be above the law. Given the scrutiny (or lack thereof) they received since 2001, that may have been a safe assumption.
But it’s a new day and these questions aren’t going away. Worse, with each new revelation, the controversy looks slightly more damaging.
Stay tuned.