Furor Over Firings Rages Despite Gonzales Admitting Mistakes
Today Justice officials described McNulty as "incensed" over not being informed about the long lead-up to the firings.
Sampson worked with Gonzales in the White House legal counsel's office when Gonzales served as Bush's top lawyer and preceded Gonzales to the Justice Department. He was sent over, former Justice officials said, to keep an eye on then Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was not always on the same page as Gonzales and others in the White House who were crafting the controversial legal policies in the so-called "war on terror." Ashcroft was angering the White House by, among other things, urging officials to expedite legal processing of terror suspects being held indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
When Gonzales became the attorney general, Sampson became his chief of staff and was, a former Justice official says, viewed as a "political hack." But, says this official, it is unlikely that Sampson would have taken on so risky a venture as the mass firing of a bunch of U.S. attorneys without Gonzales's say-so.
And so, as Schumer pointed out at a news conference today, it'll all likely boil down to the age-old question: What did Gonzales know and when did he know it? Gonzales has maintained that the firings were indeed performance related and not politically motivated.
"I stand by the decision," Gonzales said today. "Again, all political appointees can be removed by the president of the United States for any reason. I stand by the decision, and I think it was the right decision."
In some ways, Democrats crying foul is akin to Captain Renault exclaiming in the classic Casablanca saying, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"
In 1993, in an unprecedented move, President Bill Clinton ordered Attorney General Janet Reno to fire all the U.S. attorneys across the country–much like Miers advocated in this instance–and replacing them immediately with politically connected Democrats. Republicans on the Hill went into an uproar over what they viewed as a partisan purge.
As conservative columnist William Safire wrote in a piece in the New York Times in 1994, "We wondered then if the primary purpose of that partisan purge was pure patronage," wrote Safire, "or to delay the indictment of Rep.resentative Dan Rostenkowski by Republican Jay Stephens in D.C."
Safire added that another reason "was to provide cover for the quick installation of Bill Clinton's campaign worker and law student, Paula Casey, as U.S. Attorney in Little Rock to abort a potentially dangerous investigation into a fraudulent loan that benefited the Clintons."
Former Justice officials describe this U.S. attorney crisis as a "self-inflicted stupid wound" and a symbol of just how much Gonzales appears to be in over his head. Still, the level of venom directed at Gonzales from Capitol Hill is quite out of proportion to the actual stated offense.
After all, U.S. attorneys, who are the chief federal law enforcement officials around the country, are inherently political animals. They are appointed by the president and do serve at his pleasure. They are expected to follow through on the president's law enforcement priorities, and consequently they can be fired at will, if he perceives that they are off message and straying from the pack. And U.S. attorneys do often have strained relations with the home office and do have to walk the tightrope between what their top boss may want and the cases FBI agents in their districts bring to them, which in turn reflect what particular crime problems those districts are experiencing, whether they involve public corruption, immigration, or hate crimes.
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