Selective memory
For many, the Bush administration has gone on for a pretty long time—long enough to acquire experiences that might best be forgotten. So, maybe it’s understandable that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales displayed an “extraordinary lack of recollection” when investigators looked into his involvement with the suspected purging of several U.S. attorneys by the White House. To Gonzales, the case is closed; his lawyer touted on Monday that there was no proof that Gonzales had acted unlawfully as shady personnel shifts went on under his watch.
A new report by the Offices of the Inspector General and Professional Responsibility adds to mounting evidence that the Justice Department's hiring decisions were improperly driven by political motives—namely pushing out prosecutors based on ideological ties or loyalty to a Republican agenda.
Current Attorney General Michael Mukasey has denounced the removal decisions as well as the Justice Department’s subsequent handling of the controversy. Promising "institutional change" within the department, he has appointed prosecutor Nora Dannehy to investigate the purge allegations. Good luck with that.
The nearly 400-page report is hefty, but according to the various dissections by bloggers, much remains unknown about how different officials were involved in the removal process, which the report criticizes as “unsystematic and arbitrary,” with minimal oversight.
Marcy Wheeler at FireDogLake lists a slew of White House insiders who refused to be interviewed for the probe, including White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Senior Adviser Karl Rove.
The White House might have had better luck getting staffers to talk internally. The report released Monday shows that administration counsel interviewed personnel in 2007 “in an effort to understand the circumstances surrounding the U.S. Attorney removals and be in a position to respond to this issue.” The White House Office of Legal Counsel and Attorney General were armed with a memo, which was apparently very helpful. So enlightening, in fact, that it was of no use to independent investigators, according to the report:
“The White House Counsel’s Office eventually provided to us a heavily redacted version of the document, but the redactions made the document virtually worthless as an investigative tool. We disagree with the White House’s rationale for withholding this document, particularly since the document was shared with OLC and e-mail records also show that drafts had been provided to former Attorney General Gonzales.”
Maybe Gonzales should reach for those handy notes the next time his memory fails him. You can hardly fault him, though; with so many holes riddling this case, it must be hard to keep track of what to forget.
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Comments (3)
http://www.gonzalesfacts.com/whatsnew.html
I guess many of us would like to FORGET the horrid Bush Administration. But A. Gonzales should never forget the misdeeds he
agreed to do on their behalf.
No more years for criminality, failures and lack of governing. Politicians should govern for the benefit of ALL Americans, not just chronically campaign for themselves.
Clinton fired all of the USAGs on March 24, 1993 including Jay Stephens of the DC whose investigation of Democrat Dan Rostenkowski the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.President Clinton said it was perfectly ordinary. "All those people are routinely replaced and I have not done anything differently." But this was not true. The firing of all the prosecutors was unprecedented. Previous Presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, had both retained holdovers from the previous Administration and only replaced them gradually as their tenures expired. This allowed continuity of leadership within the U.S. Attorney offices during the transition.
While it seems that the firing of these eight Attorneys was done quite poorly, the Democrats should not start firing off salvo after salvo saying this was all a Republican consipracy.