Inside Justice's political purge
EVEN IN THE most partisan periods in US history, the men and women of the Justice Department have taken pride in their ability to put justice above politics. Richard Nixon's attorney general, Elliot Richardson, resigned rather than fire a special prosecutor who was getting too close to the truth about Watergate. This is why history will judge so harshly the politicization of the department under President Bush.
The department's inspector general and its office of professional responsibility issued a damning report Monday on the way several US attorneys, all Bush appointees, got the heave-ho in 2006. According to investigators, political considerations played a role in at least three of the nine sackings.
Investigators might have learned the truth about even more of the firings if two former White House aides, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, had not stonewalled them.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who was not at Justice when the purge took place, has appointed a career federal prosecutor from Connecticut, Nora Dannehy, to determine whether officials committed perjury or obstruction of justice - either in the firings themselves or in trying to cover up the circumstances surrounding them. Dannehy should use every possible means to compel testimony from officials.
An attorney general is free to replace US attorneys for many reasons, but politics is not supposed to be one of them. Yet, the investigators found "significant evidence that partisan political considerations were an important factor in the removal of several of the US attorneys."
The report leaves no doubt in the case of David Iglesias, a fired US attorney from New Mexico. Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Heather Wilson, both Republicans, complained to Justice about Iglesias for, in their view, his failure to prosecute allegations of vote fraud and corruption by Democrats. The department tried to hide the true reasons for his removal, the report concluded, with public misstatements and "disingenuous after-the-fact rationalizations."
In another case, the report says, the department dropped a US attorney to make way for a favorite of Rove.
The report criticizes the then-attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, for being "remarkably unengaged" and says that he and his deputy, Paul McNulty, "abdicated their responsibility to safeguard the integrity and independence of the department." Gonzales had to resign after members of Congress demanded an explanation for the removals and he made contradictory statements. Neither Congress nor the inspector general could get the truth about the White House role in the purge. Let's hope Dannehy can. 