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Political Purging at the Dept. of Justice
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| Political Purging at the Dept. of Justice
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| otherone4life |
Worst politicization of the DOJ since the Saturday Night Massacre. And PS NCMike, that bullshit line you tried to throw out about "Clinton did it too" is debunked. 4 year tenures with resignations and new hirings done at the beginning of new administrations. Please go back to Rush's site for your new marching orders.
White House Said to Prompt Firing of Prosecutors
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, March 12 — The White House was deeply involved in the decision late last year to dismiss federal prosecutors, including some who had been criticized by Republican lawmakers, administration officials said Monday.
Last October, President Bush spoke with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to pass along concerns by Republicans that some prosecutors were not aggressively addressing voter fraud, the White House said Monday. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, was among the politicians who complained directly to the president, according to an administration official.
The president did not call for the removal of any specific United States attorneys, said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. She said she had “no indication” that the president had been personally aware that a process was already under way to identify prosecutors who would be fired.
But Ms Perino disclosed that White House officials had consulted with the Justice Department in preparing the list of United States attorneys who would be removed.
Within a few weeks of the president’s comments to the attorney general, the Justice Department forced out seven prosecutors.
Previously, the White House had said that Mr. Bush’s aides approved the list of prosecutors only after it was compiled.
The role of the president and his advisers in the prosecutor shakeup is likely to intensify calls by Congress for an investigation. It is the worst crisis of Mr. Gonzales’s tenure and provoked charges that the dismissals were a political purge threatening the historical independence of the Justice Department.
The idea of dismissing federal prosecutors originated in the White House more than a year earlier, White House and Justice officials said Monday.
In early 2005, Harriet E. Miers, then the White House legal counsel, asked a Justice Department official whether it would be feasible to replace all United States attorneys when their four-year terms expired, according to the Justice Department. The proposal came as the administration was considering which political appointees to replace in the second term, Ms. Perino said.
Ms. Miers sent her query to D. Kyle Sampson, a top aide to Mr. Gonzales, the Justice officials said. Mr. Sampson, who resigned Monday, replied that filling so many jobs at once would overtax the department. He suggested replacing a smaller group, according to e-mail messages and other memorandums compiled by the Justice Department.
Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, also had rejected the idea of replacing all the prosecutors, Ms. Perino said. But as Ms. Miers worked with Mr. Sampson on devising a list of attorneys to oust, Mr. Rove relayed to her complaints he had received that the Justice Department was not moving aggressively on voter fraud cases.
The White House continued to defend its handling of the dismissals.
“We continue to believe that the decision to remove and replace U.S. attorneys who serve at the pleasure of the president was perfectly appropriate and within our discretion,” Ms. Perino said.
“We stand by the Department of Justice assertion that they identified the seven U.S. attorneys who were removed, as they have said, based on performance and managerial reasons.”
On Monday Congressional Democrats demanded more information from the White House about the ousters, calling on Mr. Rove to testify about any discussions he had had about federal prosecutors. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he would seek a subpoena for Mr. Rove’s testimony if he did not appear voluntarily.
Justice Department officials have said they removed the United States attorney in Arkansas earlier last year to make room for a Republican Party lawyer and onetime adviser to Mr. Rove.
In the other cases, though, the department at first denied that the dismissals were performance related, and then said they were, citing managerial problems, lack of aggressiveness and conflicts over seeking the death penalty or enforcing immigration laws.
Justice Department officials said Monday that they had only learned recently about Mr. Sampson’s extensive e-mail and memos with Ms. Miers about the prosecutors. The communications were discovered Thursday when Mr. Sampson turned over the material to officials who were assembling documents in response to Congressional requests.
The documents did not provide a clear motive for the firings. Some suggested that department officials were dissatisfied with specific prosecutors, but none cited aggressive public corruption inquiries or failure to pursue voter fraud cases as an explicit reason to remove them.
On Dec. 4, 2006, three days before the dismissals, Mr. Sampson sent an e-mail message to the White House with a copy to Ms. Miers outlining plans to carry out the firings
“We would like to execute this on Thursday, Dec. 7,” Mr. Sampson wrote. Because some United States attorneys were still in Washington attending a conference, he planned to postpone telling them they were being fired. He wrote, “We want to wait until they are back home and dispersed to reduce chatter.”
Mr. Sampson predicted that dismissals might stir debate. “Prepare to Withstand Political Upheaval,” he wrote in describing what to expect as a result of the firings. “U.S Attorneys desiring to save their jobs aided by their allies in the political arena as well as the Justice Department community, likely will make efforts to preserve themselves in office. You should expect these efforts to be strenuous.”
Mr. Rove’s role in expressing concerns about prosecutors had emerged in recent days. The White House acknowledged Sunday that Mr. Rove had passed on complaints to Mr. Gonzales and Ms. Miers about David C. Iglesias, who was dismissed as the United States attorney in New Mexico. Mr. Rove’s role surfaced after the McClatchy Newspapers reported that a Republican Party official in New Mexico had complained to Mr. Rove in 2005 and again a year later about Mr. Iglesias’s failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation.
Concern about voter registration fraud turned political in several states in 2004 where there were close elections, including some lost narrowly by Republican candidates.
An associate of Mr. Rove said Monday that although he had learned in November that the prosecutors were being replaced, his conversation with Allen Weh, the Republican Party chairman in New Mexico, and subsequently with Mr. Gonzales, were brief exchanges at holiday parties and that they occurred after Dec. 7, when Mr. Iglesias and six other prosecutors were dismissed.
John McKay, the ousted United States attorney in Seattle, said last week while in Washington to testify before Congress that White House lawyers interviewing him for a possible federal judgeship had asked him why he had “mishandled” an investigation into voter fraud allegations in his state following the 2004 elections.
House and Senate investigators have already made clear that they want to examine exactly what role the White House, Mr. Sampson, Ms. Miers (who left the administration in January), Mr. Rove and other senior officials played in the matter. Last week, six of the fired prosecutors testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Officials said Mr. Sampson, who once worked at the Bush White House interviewing candidates for United States attorney, was largely behind the effort at the Justice Department.
This week, the United States attorney dispute will be aired on the Senate floor during debate over legislation to roll back a provision of the antiterrorism law that allows President Bush to appoint interim United States attorneys indefinitely.
Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting. |
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| Ass Boil |
Why does it not bother more people that slimy reptilian "political" advisor Karl Rove has his grimy shithooks into EVERY part of this great country's process? This fucking scumbag is outing covert agents, and getting US Attorneys fired and replacing them with his friends.
It's disgusting. And this freak is our President's right hand man. |
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| zimmie |
The Pot Calling the Kettle “Interim”
Democrats with short memories rail about Bush’s removal of U.S. attorneys.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
In lambasting the Bush administration for politicizing the appointment of the nation’s United States attorneys, Democrats may be on the verge of redefining chutzpah.
The campaign is being spearheaded on the Judiciary Committee by Senator Dianne Feinstein. She contends that at least seven U.S. attorneys — tellingly, including those for two districts in her home state — have been “forced to resign without cause.” They are, she further alleges, to be replaced by Bush appointees who will be able to avoid Senate confirmation thanks to a “little known provision” of the Patriot Act reauthorization law enacted in 2006.
Going into overdrive, Feinstein railed on the Senate floor Tuesday that “[t]he public response has been shock. Peter Nunez, who served as the San Diego U.S. Attorney from 1982 to 1988 has said, ‘This is like nothing I’ve ever seen in my 35-plus years.’”
Yes, the public, surely, is about as “shocked, shocked” as Claude Raines’s Captain Renault, and one is left to wonder whether Mr. Nunez spent the 1990s living under a rock.
One of President Clinton’s very first official acts upon taking office in 1993 was to fire every United States attorney then serving — except one, Michael Chertoff, now Homeland Security secretary but then U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, who was kept on only because a powerful New Jersey Democrat, Sen. Bill Bradley, specifically requested his retention.
Were the attorneys Clinton fired guilty of misconduct or incompetence? No. As a class they were able (and, it goes without saying, well-connected). Did he shove them aside to thwart corruption investigations into his own party? No. It was just politics, plain and simple.
Patronage is the chief spoil of electoral war. For a dozen years, Republicans had been in control of the White House, and, therefore of the appointment of all U.S. attorneys. President Clinton, as was his right, wanted his party’s own people in. So he got rid of the Republican appointees and replaced them with, predominantly, Democrat appointees (or Republicans and Independents who were acceptable to Democrats).
We like to think that law enforcement is not political, and for the most part — the day-to-day part, the proceedings in hundreds of courtrooms throughout the country — that is true. But appointments are, and have always been political. Does it mean able people are relieved before their terms are up? Yes, but that is the way the game is played.
Indeed, a moment’s reflection on the terms served by U.S. attorneys reveals the emptiness of Feinstein’s argument. These officials are appointed for four years, with the understanding that they serve at the pleasure of the president, who can remove them for any reason or no reason. George W. Bush, of course, has been president for six years. That means every presently serving U.S. attorney in this country has been appointed or reappointed by this president.
That is, contrary to Clinton, who unceremoniously cashiered virtually all Reagan and Bush 41 appointees, the current President Bush can only, at this point, be firing his own appointees. Several of them, perhaps even all of them, are no doubt highly competent. But it is a lot less unsavory, at least at first blush, for a president to be rethinking his own choices than to be muscling out another administration’s choices in an act of unvarnished partisanship.
Feinstein’s other complaint, namely, that the Bush administration is end-running the Constitution’s appointment process, which requires Senate confirmation for officers of the United States (including U.S. attorneys), is also unpersuasive.
As she correctly points out, the Patriot Act reauthorization did change prior law. Previously, under the federal code (Title 28, Section 546), if the position of district U.S. attorney became vacant, it could be filled for up to 120 days by an interim appointee selected by the attorney general. What would happen at the end of that 120-day period, if a new appointee (who would likely also be the interim appointee) had not yet been appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate? The old law said the power to appoint an interim U.S. attorney would then shift to the federal district court, whose appointee would serve until the president finally got his own nominee confirmed.
This was a bizarre arrangement. Law enforcement is exclusively an executive branch power. The Constitution gives the judiciary no role in executive appointments, and the congressional input is limited to senate confirmation. U.S. attorneys are important members of the Justice Department — the top federal law enforcement officers in their districts. But while the attorney general runs the Justice Department, U.S. attorneys work not for the AG but for the president. They are delegated to exercise executive authority the Constitution reposes only in the president, and can thus be terminated at will by the president. Consequently, having the courts make interim appointments made no practical sense, in addition to being constitutionally dubious.
The Patriot Act reauthorization remedied this anomaly by eliminating both the role of the district courts and the 120-day limit on the attorney general’s interim appointments. The interim appointee can now serve until the senate finally confirms the president’s nominee.
Is there potential for abuse here? Of course — there’s no conceivable appointments structure that would not have potential for abuse. Like it or not, in our system, voters are the ultimate check on political excess.
So yes, a president who wanted to bypass the Constitution’s appointments process could fire the U.S. attorney, have the attorney general name an interim appointee, and simply refrain from submitting a nominee to the senate for confirmation. But we’ve also seen plenty of abuse from the Senate side of appointments — and such abuse was not unknown under the old law. Though the president can nominate very able U.S. attorney candidates — just as this president has also nominated very able judicial candidates — those appointments are often stalled in the confirmation process by the senate’s refusal to act, its imperious blue-slip privileges (basically, a veto for senators from the home state of the nominee), and its filibusters.
But that’s politics. The president tries to shame the senate into taking action on qualified nominees. Senator Feinstein, now, is trying to shame the White House — making sure the pressure is on the administration not to misuse the Patriot Act modification as an end-around the confirmation process.
Why is Feinstein doing this? After all, the next president may be a Democrat and could exploit to Democratic advantage the same perks the Bush administration now enjoys.
Well, because Feinstein is not going to be the next president. She is still going to be a senator and clearly intends to remain a powerful one. Aside from being enshrined in the Constitution, the confirmations process is a significant source of senatorial power no matter who the president is. Practically speaking, confirmation is what compels a president of either party to consult senators rather than just peremptorily installing the president’s own people. Over the years, it has given senators enormous influence over the selection of judges and prosecutors in their states. Feinstein does not want to see that power diminished.
It’s worth noting, however, that the same Democrats who will be up in arms now were mum in the 1990s. President Clinton not only fired U.S. attorneys sweepingly and without cause. He also appointed high executive-branch officials, such as Justice Department civil-rights division chief Bill Lann Lee, on an “acting” basis even though their positions called for senate confirmation. This sharp maneuver enabled those officials to serve even though it had become clear that they would never be confirmed.
Reporting on Lee on February 26, 1998, the New York Times noted: “Under a Federal law known as the Vacancy Act, a person may serve in an acting capacity for 120 days. But the [Clinton] Administration has argued that another Federal law supercedes the Vacancy Act and gives the Attorney General the power to make temporary law enforcement assignments of any duration.”
What the Clinton administration dubiously claimed was the law back then is, in fact, the law right now. Yet, for some strange reason — heaven knows what it could be — Senator Feinstein has only now decided it’s a problem. Like the public, I’m shocked.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
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| Ass Boil |
The fact that you just posted that is official proof that you are illiterate.
Thank you for once again embarassing yourself and entertaining us with your stupidity.
LOL |
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| zimmie |
| never confuse facts with your reality..... |
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