First in this week's series of the Friday News Dump is the convenient late-night release of records that puts future former Attorney General Abu Gonzales in a meeting that decided the fate of the fired US attorneys. Unfortunately this puts a lie to the previous claim that the AG, AG, was not part of the process. On March 13th, the Goner had said: “But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on.” He went on to whine that there are “110,000 employees” of the Justice Department and he cannot know all the decisions being made, as if he was out of the loop in the firing of the eight US attorneys. Firing US attorneys has the same priority, I suppose, as terminating a DOJ cleaning lady or any of the other “110,000 employees” for sloppy dusting or serving spoiled lunchmeat.
Laughable at the time he said it, now shown to be an outright lie. The recent document dump plainly puts AG at a meeting of Justice Dep't principals as they hashed out the plan to fire the US attorneys for political reasons, and even discussed the rationales conjured for canning them. And they wonder why the Congressional Judiciary Chairmen are insisting on testimony under oath.
The documents surfaced just hours after [Gonzales' “resigned” Chief of Staff D. Kyle] Sampson (pictured at right), through his lawyer, reached an agreement to testify about the firings before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week. He resigned from the department last week.
If these US attorneys all serve at the “pleasure of the president” (I'll leave any further imagery of that statement to the Rude Pundit), then why manufacture all this bullshit? Just fire 'em and move on. Remember the noise over Clinton firing a bunch of clerks in the Travel Office? In the end this recent flap is an internal Republican affair since the attorneys themselves, all Bush appointees, are the ones claiming injustice at their firings. By the way, when the movie of this episode is made, Jason Alexander--i.e., George Costanza from Seinfeld-- will of course be cast as Sampson.
The US attorneys' claims are critical because, if true, they put an unhealthy political (nay, criminal) spin to the conduct of the Justice Department. The president is not allowed to selectively terminate attorneys who refuse to attack his cronies' political opponents or attorneys who refuse to participate in other partisan shenanigans. The president gets to appoint them, but we all pay their salaries and they are charged with defending our Constitution.
Rover, Darth Cheney and Dumbya plotting to let this out on Friday night is further evidence of the disdain they have for the public's attention span. By Monday morning this will all be forgotten.
1 comment:
Post a Comment