Furor Over Firings Rages Despite Gonzales Admitting Mistakes
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stood in his flag-bedecked conference room Tuesday, surrounded by grand portraits of his predecessors, and tried to get ahead of the U.S. attorney firing crisis that has consumed the Justice Department and threatens to tarnish his already controversial legacy.
Comparing himself to a CEO of a big company, Gonzales said that he takes responsibility for the way the department fired the U.S. attorneys and how it explained its decisions. But while resorting to the long-favored "mistakes were made" tradition, Gonzales also distanced himself from the year-and-a-half-long process that resulted in the firings, even though his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, who just resigned, was intimately involved.
"As we can all imagine, in an organization of 110,000 people," said Gonzales, "I am not aware of every bit of information that passes through the halls of the Department of Justice, nor am I aware of all decisions."
Sampson's resignation is just the first of a series of dominoes to fall in the quickly escalating crisis at the Justice Department over the firings of eight federal prosecutors last year that Democrats in Congress have charged were politically motivated. It's a crisis that could engulf Gonzales and his political team if it isn't contained quickly.
But key Democrats in Congress, notably Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, have vowed to stoke this fire until it results in Gonzales's resignation.
The story has turned into a political and media frenzy, with Schumer vowing to use subpoena powers to summon President Bush's political adviser Karl Rove as well as other senior Bush aides to testify about their roles in the firings. And most likely, Sampson also will be called to testify under oath about how the list of prosecutors was drawn up.
"We stand by the fact that no U.S. attorney was removed to interfere with a public corruption investigation," Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse told U.S. News, "or, for that matter, to interfere with a criminal or civil investigation or prosecution."
Democrats in Congress remain yet to be convinced. If Schumer makes good on his subpoena threat, it could result in a legal showdown between this administration and Congress over the issue of executive privilege. There's a long tradition regarding White House staff not testifying publicly and especially in response to subpoenas, and this administration in particular has wielded executive privilege to refuse to provide information to Congress even when Republicans were running the show.
The speed of Sampson's departure, former Justice officials say, signals the seriousness of the crisis. More resignations and firings are sure to follow. Sampson's resignation came in the wake of revelations today that then White House counsel Harriet Miers had proposed to Sampson the firing of all 93 U.S. attorneys at the start of Bush's second term in 2005–even though they were all his people.
Documents released by the Justice Department showed that the dismissals occurred after Bush had passed on to Gonzales complaints he'd received that some prosecutors had not aggressively gone after voter-fraud cases involving Democrats, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. Gonzales then agreed to fire a small group of U.S. attorneys instead. Sampson has said he failed to tell his boss how much he had communicated with Miers, resulting in Gonzales, his deputy Paul McNulty, and others providing inaccurate testimony to Congress over the evolution of the firings.
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.
So what's really driving this story is not what Gonzales may or may not have done in this particular instance but the sum total of what he represents to many Democrats and many law enforcement officials, including FBI agents and career prosecutors–to whom the administration's controversial "war on terror" legal policies are anathema.
Gonzales was a central architect of those policies when he was White House counsel. Gonzales was part of a tight-knit small group consisting of his deputies Timothy Flanigan and David Leitch; the Pentagon's legal counsel William Haynes; John Yoo, a Justice Department attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel; and David Addington, then special counsel to Vice President Cheney, who's now Cheney's chief of staff.
Gonzales, Addington, and Yoo were perhaps the most aggressive proponents of the expansive use of presidential powers. Gonzales played a central role in crafting the policies that resulted in the warrantless surveillance of terror suspects on U.S. soil, the creation of military commissions without congressional fiat, the approval and use of aggressive interrogation techniques against terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay and in Iraq, and the sidelining of the Geneva Conventions. It's those policies and the failure of the Republican-led Congress to provide any oversight of the Justice Department and the FBI, and ultimately the war in Iraq, that are fueling the intense emotions over the firings of the U.S. attorneys.
To many in Congress, including some in Bush's own party, Gonzales is the symbol of everything that has gone wrong since the 9/11 attacks. And for that reason, he's going to have a tough time emerging unscathed from the searing heat of this scandal.