The Mess He Left Behind
Gonzales's successor will face daunting challenges at a scandal-plagued agency
The resignation of embattled U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was never a question of if but of when. So when Gonzales finally announced last week that he will leave the Justice Department, his departure offered a glimmer of hope that the beleaguered agency would at last have a chance to remake an image sullied by months of scandals.
Gonzales's inability to explain—or even, he said, remember—whether politics played an undue role in the department's hiring, firing, and prosecution decisions turned the former Texas Supreme Court judge and presidential confidant into a symbol of all that was wrong inside the 110,000-person bureaucracy.
But with little more than a year remaining in the Bush administration, the next attorney general will face daunting challenges in trying to rebuild the department. Election-year politics, congressional probes, an unpopular president—these and other barriers mean that even the strongest candidate may have to settle for piecemeal reform.
The initial hurdle for the White House is finding someone with the bipartisan credibility necessary to winning Senate confirmation—and to regaining the confidence of both department staffers and the American public. As when President Gerald Ford named the respected Edward Levi to the attorney general's post after the Watergate scandal, the White House this time will need to appoint someone whose independence and judgment are unquestioned.
"More than any individual policy, the Senate will be looking for a guarantee that the attorney general will serve justice rather than the president," says Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor.
Loyalists. That guarantee could be hard to secure. Many of the possible replacements for Gonzales—Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, and soon-to-be Acting Attorney General Paul Clement—are seen as loyal conservatives. And the White House may be unwilling to nominate someone who would break from some of the core tenets that made Gonzales so divisive: the use of executive power to justify practices like the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic wiretapping and limiting the rights of the detainees at the Guantánamo Bay naval base.
What's more, winning Senate approval may require other compromises by the Bush administration. The Democratic-led Congress could hold up the confirmation process with its outstanding subpoenas to the White House for documents and testimony related to the unexplained firings of at least eight U.S. attorneys last December and the wiretapping program. Democrats have questioned whether inappropriate political considerations played into the firings, and they remain concerned about the scope and legality of the NSA program.
Confirmation won't put an end to questions about the department, either. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, has vowed to continue the investigations that led to Gonzales's downfall. In addition to the U.S. attorney dismissals, the department has been under fire for alleged political influence on cases handled by the civil rights division. The department could come in for even more criticism when Inspector General Glenn Fine releases his reports into whether any wrongdoing occurred. And Fine confirmed last week that he is looking into whether Gonzales lied to Congress about a number of issues, including the NSA program and the U.S. attorney scandal.
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