Why Gonzo Isn't Gone

Despite the revelations about the politicization of federal justice under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, he's in no apparent danger of losing his job. By the Rove/Bush standard, his performance is exemplary. As ordered, he signed off on the firing of at least 8 U.S. Attorneys for political reasons. Then, when testifying before Congress, Gonzales claimed memory lapses that would probably have qualified him for this clinical trial. Now, his former classmates at Harvard Law School are trying to shame him into behaving like someone who actually gives a damn about the law. A letter from several dozen of the Class of 1982 urges Gonzales to:

“... relent from this reckless path, and begin to restore respect for the rule of law we all learned to love many years ago.”

You'd think that folks who graduated from Harvard Law would be smart enough to figure it out: the reason the attorney general still has his job, while underlings fall like dominoes (Deputy AG McNulty is the latest to "resign"), is precisely because he follows the reckless path Rove has mapped out for the DOJ.

Gonzo's safe as long as he continues to show the utter disrespect for the rule of law and the Constitution that he's shown to date.

Make that 10 Fired U.S. Attorneys

The former U.S. Attorney for West Virginia, Karl K. "Kasey" Warner, now says that he, too, was asked by the Department of Justice to resign. And he, too, suspects that the reasons were strictly political. When the DOJ first told him to get lost, he refused, (saying that he took his orders from the president). He promptly got a letter from Harriet Miers, then the president's counsel, telling him he was fired. No explanation.

"The facts speak for themselves," Warner is quoted in a CBS News report as saying. "If they want to look at the cases I had and the corruption cases we have now, people can come to their own conclusions about why I was let go." The report goes on to note:

Some former U.S. attorneys such as New Mexico's David Iglesias said Republican politicians pressured them to rush public corruption investigations in election years. Warner would not comment on whether he received any such pressure and would not say who was being investigated when he was fired.

"Speaking generally," he said, "in my mind, if you want a good justice system, you don't remove U.S. attorneys to thwart ongoing criminal investigations."

Department of [Obstruction of] Justice?

A federal judge has approved a limited immunity deal for Monica Goodling, the Department of Justice liaison who refused to testify before Congress about the firings of U.S. Attorneys. But, it looks like, even before Goodling's testimony, the truth is coming out. The entire Department of Justice has become just another tool to advance the Rove agenda of a permanent Republican majority. No matter which party you favor politically, this harms all of us.

The intended result of this messing with personnel at all levels, from top of the food chain to bottom, has already been suggested from anecdotal evidence re the firings of the 8 (make that, 9) U.S. Attorneys : If you committed a federal crime and were a powerful Republican or connected to one or two, the investigation would disappear as quickly as the "disloyal" employee who allowed it to begin. If you were a prominent Democrat or connected to one or two, you might find yourself hauled before a federal court on thin or bogus charges -- preferably, from the power base's POV, within weeks of an election in a key district.

That's the sort of design that brings us closer to becoming a police state, where the prisons are filled with political prisoners, and the well-connected corrupt are free to drain the country of its resources.

Ms. Goodling also moved to block the hiring of prosecutors with résumés that suggested they might be Democrats, even though they were seeking posts that were supposed to be nonpartisan, two department officials said.

And she helped maintain lists of all the United States attorneys that graded their loyalty to the Bush administration, including work on past political campaigns, and noted if they were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

By the time Ms. Goodling resigned in April — after her role in the firing of the prosecutors became public and she had been promoted to the role of White House liaison — she and other senior department officials had revamped personnel practices affecting employees from the top of the agency to the bottom....

...Mr. Comey [deputy AG under John Ashcroft] said that if the accusations about Ms. Goodling’s partisan actions were true, the damage was deep and real.

“I don’t know how you would put that genie back in the bottle, if people started to believe we were hiring our A.U.S.A.s (Assistant United States Attorneys) for political reasons,” he said at a House hearing this month. “I don’t know that there’s any window you can go to to get the department’s reputation back if that kind of stuff is going on.”