The Liberty Papers

It’s easy to dismiss the fact that a few U.S. Attorneys were dismissed in the middle of the Bush Presidency. After all, they do serve, to some extent, at the pleasure of the President and it is common for each incoming President to ask for the resignation of every sitting U.S. Attorney.

So, why does this story matter ?

For an answer, all we need to do is check out the internal White House emails released yesterday:

WASHINGTON, March 13 – Late in the afternoon on Dec. 4, a deputy to Harriet E. Miers, then the White House counsel and one of President Bush’s most trusted aides, sent a two-line e-mail message to a top Justice Department aide. “We’re a go,” it said, approving a long-brewing plan to remove seven federal prosecutors considered weak or not team players.

The message, from William K. Kelley of the White House counsel’s office to D. Kyle Sampson, the chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, put in motion a plan to fire United States attorneys that had been hatched 22 months earlier by Ms. Miers. Three days later, the seven prosecutors were summarily dismissed. An eighth had been forced out in the summer.

(…)

While the target list of prosecutors was shaped and shifted, officials at the Justice Department and the White House, members of Congress and even an important Republican lawyer and lobbyist in New Mexico were raising various concerns.

In rating the prosecutors, Mr. Sampson factored in whether they “exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general,” according to documents released by the Justice Department. In one e-mail message, Mr. Sampson questioned a colleague about the record of the federal prosecutor in San Diego, Carol C. Lam. Referring to the office of the deputy attorney general, Mr. Sampson wrote: “Has ODAG ever called Carol Lam and woodshedded her re immigration enforcement? Has anyone?” Ms. Lam was one of the seven fired prosecutors.

Two others, Paul K. Charlton in Arizona and Daniel K. Bogden in Nevada, were faulted as being “unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them,” according to another e-mail message to Mr. Sampson, referring to pornography prosecutions. These pornography prosecutions aren’t regarding adult pornography like you find on teen tuber xxx as it’s legal in the USA, it’s child pornography prosecutions there are actually referring to.

Another United States attorney, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, was added to the hit list in the fall of 2006 after criticism from his home state, including a demand by Senator Pete V. Domenici, a Republican, to meet with the attorney general to discuss the performance of Mr. Iglesias’s office.

And there, you see, is the problem. By emphasizing loyalty to the President and Attorney General, and adherence to an ideological view of prosecutions, the Justice Department was attempting to politicize the U.S. Attorney’s office in a way that it had not been in the past. While the office itself is clearly a political appointment, prosecutors have traditionally been isolated from political pressure of the kind that Miers and Gonzalez were attempting to apply here. Prosecutors have also enjoyed no small degree of discretion over the cases they handle, and it’s fairly clear that the Department of Justice was trying to consolidate that authority in Washington by making it clear that certain types of cases (i.e., the pornography prosecutions noted above) should be given priority over others.

So, in short, the reason this matters is because it appears that the Bush Administration was trying to put political pressure on U.S. Attorneys across the nation by punishing those that didn’t follow the party line.

Update 3/21/07: Ignore all of the above, I was wrong when I wrote. The reason why can be found here.