Ashcroft's Way
America's top cop has been demonized and lionized. He's a complex guy all right, just not the guy everyone thinks he is
Ashcroft isn't the first complex political figure to invite controversy; it's just that the controversy, in his case, seems so intense and, at times, at variance with the facts. During his confirmation hearings, Democrats attacked him for remarks he made as a senator, mischaracterizing a respected African-American judge as "pro-criminal." But last year, Ashcroft's then deputy, Larry Thompson, who is African-American, commissioned a consulting group to conduct a diversity study of the Justice Department. The study documented a plethora of complaints by minority attorneys, which Ashcroft's aides say he wants to fix. Ashcroft's colleagues say he genuinely cares about diversity. Roscoe Howard, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, is an African-American who meets regularly with Ashcroft. "We have talked about diversity, not only in the [Justice] department but also in [my] office, how I was going to accomplish that. And how it was important to him as attorney general. I think that there's an aspect of him that the public just hasn't gotten to know. He's a good guy."
Even some critics say Ashcroft has been a good attorney general. "I think he's doing fairly well," says Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who has taken Ashcroft to task in the past. Ashcroft got an A- for effectiveness last January from the nonpartisan magazine National Journal, second only to Secretary of State Powell. "I think he has been a strong attorney general," says Glenn Fine, Justice's inspector general, the department's watchdog. "He has a clear mission. He has pursued that mission."
Prodding. In assessing Ashcroft's role as attorney general, two useful areas of inquiry are abortion and the death penalty. Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, says that while access to Ashcroft's Justice Department is tougher than it was under his predecessor, Janet Reno, the attorney general, "with regular prodding," has aggressively protected abortion clinics from violence and prosecuted clinic bombers. Upon taking office, Ashcroft decided not to dismantle the national task force on clinic bombings created by Reno. He has provided federal protection for doctors facing death threats, put abortion clinic bombing suspects on the FBI's 10-most-wanted list, and launched a terrorism investigation into hundreds of fake-anthrax threat letters received by abortion clinics. But Saporta says Ashcroft also created a "breach of trust" and a "conflict of interest" by asking the same prosecutors who protect clinics to prosecute them if they violate the new ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. That aside, Saporta says, "on numerous occasions, they have done the right thing."
The reason--one of the rare areas of agreement among some critics and supporters of the attorney general--is Ashcroft's belief that all the laws must be enforced consistently. This has won Ashcroft a reputation by many at Justice as a "prosecutor's attorney general." But that can cut both ways. Nearly 40 percent of the cases Ashcroft has authorized for the death penalty have been against the wishes of U.S. attorneys. On the other hand, Ashcroft seldom rejects their requests to seek the death penalty. "He's imposing his own views on the death penalty on the entire nation," says David Brock of the Death Penalty Research Center. But Justice sources say Ashcroft usually accepts the recommendations of his capital murder committee. Even some of Reno's former colleagues say Ashcroft is applying the right principles. "A lot of what he is doing, centralizing some of the decisions away from the U.S. attorneys, could eliminate some of the disparity [in prosecutions from district to district]," says Robert Litt, a Justice Department lawyer who worked for Reno. "I agree with the structural ideas. I disagree with the policies he sets. But he has a right to set those policies."
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