Thinking about Gonzalez

[nancylebov]

Ok, he fired attorneys who didn't do partisan prosecutions. This suggests that many, perhaps all, of the attorneys he didn't fire were doing partison prosecutions, and not prosecuting Republicans they should have been going after.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Not necessarily. They might simply not have been involved in the types of cases Gonzales wanted conformity in. Not every district had opportunities to whip up cases of voter fraud. Guilt by non-association is a poor criterion.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

I haven't been following this story very closely, having determined early on that there's no there there, but as I understand it what has come out is that Gonzalez delegated the entire staff review process so completely that he took no interest in it himself, not even knowing who was to be fired or why. And that, embarrassed to admit this, he's been tying himself in ever more complicated knots, and embarrassing himself and the administration even more. That's why he should resign.

Delegating is all very well, but the delegates should have been told to present their recommendations to him, and he had a duty (probably constitutionally required, but at any rate part of his job) to consider them carefully on their merits, and not just rubber-stamp them without reading. Then again, how many members of Congress vote for bills without having read them? If they'd read the USA PATRIOT extension act, they'd have known it allowed the president to appoint temporary US Attorneys, and could have considered whether he ought to have that power. The clause "slipped through" because they did exactly what Gonzalez did, relying on other people to read the bill and tell them how to vote.

But as far as the actual firings are concerned, as far as I can tell there is still no evidence that any of them were improper. The early allegations that some of them were for prosecuting Republicans were easily proven false. And the guy in Washington who wouldn't investigate the 2004 election there should have been fired for it; the proverbial blind sheepdog could see that there had been massive fraud, and it was his job to find the evidence, not expect private parties to present it to him wrapped up in a bow.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

I blogged on this sometime back.
http://osewalrus.livejournal.com/127881.html

Bluntly, if the Administration had come out and said: "We don't think these AGs are properly implementing the President's agenda, we are putting in new people who will be more agressive on our issues," then it would have blown over. The Ds would have complained about further politicizing the Justice Department, but no one could have said otherwise.

Instead, they lied to Congress. They lied when explicitly asked. And they KNEW that Senators from every state -- R or D -- in which an AG was fired would ask. Because that is the protocol of how things are done. There are certain unwritten conventions of how business is conducted in DC and if you violate them, expect those who feel slighted to sqwak. So it is just plain stupid to go through this elaborate cover up exercise when you know that a bunch of Senators are going to ask questions and that they will get pissed if lied to -- even if they are from your party. By contrast, as straightforward "the President decided they were not 'team players' adequately following the President's priorities" would have been an adequate and truthful answer. Ds would have made it one more thing to grumble about, but the story would have disappeared.

What is particularly infuriating and sleazy to me is that the administration were quite happy to lie in a way that ruined people's careers. As one of the fired AGs put it "If you're going to fire me for political reasons, I can accept that. But if you say you're firing me for performance issues I'll never be able to get another job." When Clinton famously fired all the AGs to bring in his new team (subsequently reversed and done more gradually to prevent a massive disruption in the operation of the agency), no one questioned the ability of those AGs. They had no problems finding jobs and every recognized it was a routine political housecleaning. No one in the Clinton Administration ever claimed these guys were incompetent. They did not lie to Congress. They did not lie to the press.

10 years ago, some people pretended great shock that Clinton would lie about a blow job under oath during a fishing expedition on a tangetial matter to a federal investigation that involved what -- a possible financial favor to a freind while governor of Arkansas? These folks expressed the notion that such a lie under oath was a "high crime or misdemeanor" warranting impeachment. "This about honesty! This is about trust! Where's the outrage! Bring Back decency to the White House. Blah blah blah."

Now we have evidence that the Attorney General and other administration officials actively lied to Congress on matters relating to the administration of justice, lied repeatedly, lied under oath, and can offer no satisfactory explantion. And where are these same people? Where is the clamor of folks so enraged that a married man might resort to a hyper-technicality to avoid admitting he got a blow job in a public record? Why, it's not there! And these same people, who thought that it was laughable for Clinton to define "oral sex" as not "really" sex, and that for this he deserved impeachment, what do they say? "Oh, it's nothing. Just a political witch hunt."

And they wonder why the rest of the country has truned against them.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That's not quite my point--I think investigating the charges which the attorneys that weren't fired brought and didn't bring might turn up a few interesting things. madfilkentist is right that there's no reason to think that all the attorneys were abusing their office, but there's very good reason to think that some were.

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

There's the question of what constitutes "abusing their office". Choosing to focus resources on certain crimes rather than others is generally within the scope of a US Attorney's discretion, and choosing to have executive branch officials who make such choices in a way that suits the President's agenda is within his prerogatives (subject to the need for Senate confirmation for some positions and intangible considerations of "political capital" if the public disagrees with the decisions).

As osewalrus noted, the administration would have been better off to simply assert presidential prerogative and take whatever (probably small and temporary) "political capital" hit might result. Throwing up the smoke screen claim that the firings were performance-related terminations for cause is why they got into, and deserved to get into, trouble.