1. U.S. Attorneys are political appointees. They get their jobs through politics, and are put in place largely to carry out the president's law enforcement policy priorities. This is normal.
2. But there is a difference between carrying out policy and practicing politics; the line can be difficult to detect. Brooks:
Prosecutors, like other professionals, develop a code of honor to help them steer through the gray areas. This code of honor consists of a series of habits and understandings to help individual prosecutors know how to behave when loyalty to the law is in tension with loyalty to the president.
People in well-led agencies are acutely conscious of this sort of honor code. ...
But what’s striking in reading through the Justice Department e-mail messages is that senior people in that agency seem never to have thought about the proper role of politics in their decision-making. They reacted like chickens with their heads cut off when this scandal broke because they could not articulate the differences between a proper political firing and an improper one.
Moreover, they had no coherent sense of honor. Alberto Gonzales apparently never communicated a code of conduct to guide them as they wrestled with various political pressures. That’s a grievous failure of leadership.
3. The Democrats are acting like partisan crazies, making rational discussion of the Justice failures and what to do about them impossible. They smell blood in the water, and are going off in a feeding frenzy.
4. Brooks:
And the White House, instead of trying to restore some proportion, has picked a fight over a transcript. The president says he will allow White House staff to appear before Congress, but not in public, not under oath and not with a transcript. The president apparently expects his supporters to rally behind the sacred cause of No Transcript. In time of war, he’s decided to expend political capital so that his staffers can lie to Congress without legal consequences.
This whole thing would have been avoided, says Brooks, "with a few distinctions about the proper role of politics, and a little sense of honor."
The Justice scandal is yet another fruit of President Bush's management style. If you surround yourself with a management team whose primary reason for being picked was personal loyalty to you, you all but guarantee that personnel decisions will be made for reasons of loyalty, both ideological and personal. We've seen many examples of this. And if this is the atmosphere you create, it's unlikely that decision-makers within that culture will appreciate how their actions look from the outside, and the potential problems they'll create for themselves. I think the most important point Brooks makes is his noticing that the top Justice people didn't see this controversy coming, and his judging that that's because they came out of a culture that sees the world in terms of loyalty. I mentioned to some friends in the Katrina aftermath that, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" was going to be this administration's political epitaph. It's turned out to be true, insofar as that comment of Bush's captured the management culture of cronyism that has badly affected the judgment of the president and his underlings.
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I don't have a constitutional rationale, cs.
http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation/washington/congress/20070319_ap_gopwantsanswersonprosecutorfirings.html But e-mails between the Justice Department and the White House contradicted that assertion. The e-mails showed that Rove, as early as Jan. 6, 2005, questioned whether the U.S. attorneys should all be replaced at the start of Bush's second term, and to some degree worked with Miers and former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson to get some prosecutors dismissed. Have we seen those e-mails? I don't believe they've been published, but I think that they provided Congress with enough evidence to warrant an investigation. It seems to me that Bush doesn't have many Republicans in Congress standing behind him on this one. It seems to me that most of them are looking towards a compromise.
I don't know if this rationale is constitutionally based, but the President is hired by the public. Therefore, testimony should be public when it has to do with wrongdoing in public office.
I think that testimony in private & not under oath would be OK, but I don't agree with Bush that there shouldn't be a transcript of the testimony. The Decider can assert executive privilege, but he's not the King. He's not up for election in 2008, and refusing to talk publicly about allegations of wrongdoing won't be good for the GOP. or the outcome, to acknowledge that the vocal calls by Democrats for a special prosecutor, for indicting Rove, etc. were an integral part of how the process evolved. You are correct. If it wasn't for the Democrats, Valerie Plame and her little life wouldn't have mattered at all to Congress. It's good that the Democrats were there to do the right thing and look into her allegations of wrongdoing.
cs wrote: "They do not have the authority to compel public, sworn testimony without much more evidence than we have seen to this point." But the sworn testimony IS the evidence that is being sought. BTW, show me where "executive privilege" appears in the constitution. And finally, read the SCOTUS ruling "United States vs. Nixon," 1974. SCOTUS shows regard here for the (extraconstitutional) right of executive privilege, but denies that this right is absolute. And remember that this ruling was handed down *before* there was any hard evidence of criminal activity in the Nixon Administration.
"I don't have a constitutional rationale, cs." I will respectfully respond that that is all we need to know. Thank you. "Read... United States vs. Nixon." I have. The opening line- "Following indictment alleging violation of federal statutes by certain staff members of the White House and political supporters of the President, the Special Prosecutor filed a motion...." In the current situation, where is the indictment? The allegations of violating federal statutes? The Special Prosecutor?
The cases are not parallel. Further, even if they were, U.S. v. Nixon would not support the Democratic leaders call for public, sworn testimony. You see, the decision there stated that "the President's generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial..." and ordered an "in camera" inspection of the subpoenaed material. BTW, "in camera" refers to an "in chamber," or more confidential, examination of the subpoenaed material, directly contrasting the current calls for public testimony.
I want to be very clear here- I think the matter has been handled very sloppily by DOJ. The shifting rationales, incomplete explanations, etc. have fed the fire of suspicion. As even Gonzales has admitted, mistakes were made. However, at this point, we have no evidence that laws were broken. We have 8 U.S. attorneys, who serve at the pleasure of the president, who were let go under questionable circumstances.
At this point, it looks more like a dumb move by the Administration/DOJ than anything close to Watergate. And, as we all know, if politicians were arrested for dumb moves....
I will respectfully respond that that is all we need to know. Thank you. You're welcome. Have a good night.
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