Monday, March 19, 2007

More of That Was Then, This is Now

If you are one of those defenders of the White House who claim that it’s no big deal for the Attorney General to replace U.S. attorneys as he or she wishes — like Paul Gigot who said this weekend,

U.S. attorneys are political appointees. They’re prosecutors appointed by the president, who serve at his pleasure. So presumably the president can dismiss them. What did the administration do wrong in this case?

— it might do well to remember what a cool reception just such an action got from Mr. Gigot during the Clinton administration.

All of which raises the deeper issue of who is really running Justice. Ms. Reno says dismissing the 93 [U.S.] attorneys was a “joint decision” with the White House, which means the White House decided and she announced it. Her letter asked the U.S. attorneys to send their resignation letters “care of John Podesta, assistant to the president and staff secretary, with a copy to me.” Independent justice?

Funny; nobody seemed to object in January 2001 when the Bush administration replaced all 93 U.S. attorneys. It was S.O.P. As Glenn Greewald notes, it’s unusal now.

To suggest, then, that this controversy has arisen by virtue of some “double standard” — prompted by nothing more than routine firings of U.S. attorneys which “Clinton did, too” — is frivolous on its face. When Bush engaged in the routine matter of replacing all U.S. attorneys at the start of his administration, nobody objected.

The scandal derives from the highly unusual effort to cherry-pick prosecutors for firings, in the middle of an administration, for blatantly political purposes (as well as the subsequent false statements, including by top DOJ officials to Congress, about what occurred). It is true that Bush did what Clinton did — back in 2001, when nobody objected. What he has done now is manifestly not what Clinton did (or any President other than, perhaps, Richard Nixon), which is what accounts for the scandal.

It always seems ironic that the loyal Bushies will always hold up the Clinton administration as their excuse for just about anything they do; the same administration whose intelligence warnings about Al-Qaeda were ignored by the Bushies just because it came from a Democratic administration, and the same administration that left a multibillion dollar budget surplus only to have it given away by the Bushies to the rich, Halliburton, and, on shrink-wrapped pallets, to the Iraqi insurgents. I don’t remember the Clinton administration doing anything like that.