‘Loyalty’ to Bush and Gonzales Was Factor in Prosecutors’ Firings, E-Mail Shows

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Your memory is faulty. Don't take my word, take the the Congressional Research Service's.

Short version, only two attorneys between 1980-2006 were clearly forced out of their office mid term, both under Reagan.

I believe you're confusing forcing out attorneys mid-term, which is new, and cleaning out a previous admin's attorneys when a new admin comes into office, which is not--goes back to Reagan, at least.

 

The linked study only looks at US Attorneys who left before their term was up during the term of 1 president...so it does not address Janet Reno's removal of Bush's appointees (different administrations).

However in some respects it provides more insight to the case at hand because Bush is removing his own appointees.

 

There is a big difference between cleaning house as one comes into power and removing those that are investigating you and your flunkies mid-term. Even my father has stopped supporting Bush and he's a Republican, Commander in the Navy, and Baptist.

However the timing of this investigation is rather suspicious. The guy that brought it to light is Senator Schumer the chairman on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he also happens to be the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. I'd bet that he knew all about this and waited until the elections were on the horizon again. It's political maneauvering at it's worst. How many others do you think lost their jobs while he waited for this particular point in time to bring this to the public's attention?

 

Um... the elections were just this past November. Granted, they were mid-term elections, but if he wanted this to have an effect on the next elections (the one in 2008) then this is way too early to bring this to light. In fact, given the timing of this, I'd say he did it when it would have the LEAST impact on an election, as 2007 isn't even an election year.

 

The Republicans are crying that this is a ploy that the Democrats are using to impact the '08 elections. The claim is that the Dems are going to run "trumped up" scandals with a different Democratic member of Congress stumping from the steps of the Capital from now until the election.

Cry me a river Republicans...how about this, return to the core values of your party (less spending, less government, more freedom, less government interference, stop usurping the powers of the state and start being responsible in your actions) and the Democrats will either have nothing to complain about or the majority of Americans won't care about what the Democrats are saying.

Yeah I know, wishful thinking...at least the shoe will be on the other foot after '08 and we can all start complaining about Democratic party member's behavior.

 

Darkie, you got me confused Good Speech

 

Aldeth, right now is when the the campaigning for '08 starts, and he got appointed to the chairman position when the democrats took power. He waited until he was in a position to keep it at the forefront of everyone's attention to do this. It's political manuevering. I hate political manuevering like this. He should have gotten it into the light when he first found out. And the Bush camp is stupid for giving him something like this to use against the republicans. I wish both parties would fall to be honest. We need moderates in control and these two parties just won't let it happen. The leadership is too far to the left or right.

 

True, the campaigning really never stops. All I'm saying is that while the Democrats did win the 2006 elections to take control of both the House and Senate, that outcome was far from certain. I believe that if the Dems had this info prior to the 2006 elections they would have played the card then to help in those elections.

While the campaigning to become president in 2008 has already begun, the public has a notoriously short memory span. So unless this gets drug out for another year and a half or so, the vast majority of the public will have forgot about this long before the election in 2008 comes around. Keep in mind that the first primary to determine who will run for president is still more than a year away. I'm not trying to claim that bringing these charges was without political motivation - I'm just saying if this was done purely as an election tactic there were times in the recent past and in the not-too-distant future where its impact would have been greater than it is now.

 

Rags,

Never "misunderstimate" me!

It depends on the meaning of the word "is"

Summary: the Reps are whining that the Dems are picking on the Reps unfairly and I think the Reps are stupid for giving the Dems things that can be used against them.

 

Darkwolf - The problem is not really with the Republican party as much as it is with the Bush team. I think there are a lot of Republicans in office who would agree with much of what you are saying, but Bush is the leader of their party and many of them refuse to just ignore the guy until his term runs out. It's their loss, and they are shooting themselves "in the foot" so to speak out of misplaced loyalty to this guy.

In the meantime, the Dems have been gradually returning to their Jeffersonian roots and talking less government and more power to the states as a result of Bush's failures and his problems with the war in Iraq. Jefferson and Madison often argued that a war mostly benefits the "patronage" class of power mongers who profit off the military during wartime at the expense of both the average citizen and his/her civil liberties. The Dems have hit the system of partronage and the loss of civil liberties under the Bush regime pretty hard. As for government spending in general...the Dems would probably not be much better than Bush; it would just be different.

[ March 22, 2007, 04:16: Message edited by: Chandos the Red ]

 

Really great interview on this with Bob Barr (~6,5 MB file). Clearly no liberal, he served as a US attorney under Ronald Reagan in the Northern District of Georgia from 1986-90. on the issue:

Interestingly, Barr once mentioned that on the abuse of executive power and the issues of the Detainee and Patriort acts he cooperates with the ACLU His argument was that, while he has many things to disagree with the ACLU about, they are dead on on this issue and that that's a very good reason to talk and cooperate. Common sense and pragmatism.

 

Here's something interesting, from Tennesean.com

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070321/NEWS08/703210440

Fired U.S. attorneys ranked above peers in prosecutions

WASHINGTON — Six of the eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department ranked in the top third among their peers for the number of prosecutions filed last year, according to an analysis of federal records.

In addition, five of the eight were among the government's top performers in winning convictions.


The analysis undercuts Justice Department claims that the prosecutors were dismissed because of lackluster job performance. Democrats contend the firings were politically motivated, and calls are increasing for the resignation or ouster of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Immigration cases — a top Bush administration priority, especially in states along the porous Southwest border — helped boost the total number of prosecutions for U.S. attorneys in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle.

Four of the prosecutors also rated high in pursuing drug cases, according to Justice Department data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Only one of the eight received a better-than-average ranking in prosecuting weapons cases.

...

The data on prosecutions and convictions, provided to TRAC by the Justice Department's executive office that oversees U.S. attorneys, indicates the majority of the fired prosecutors were hardly slackers.

They show:

• Except for Chiara and Bud Cummins in Little Rock, the group ranked in the top third among the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys in contributing to an overall 106,188 federal prosecutions filed last year.

• Of those six, all but Kevin Ryan in San Francisco also scored among the top third in winning a collective 98,939 convictions.

• Three districts — Arizona, New Mexico and San Diego — were among the five highest in number of immigration prosecutions. Given their proximity to the Mexican border, the results come as little surprise. The Justice Department, however, attributed former San Diego prosecutor Carol Lam's firing in part to lagging immigration prosecutions and convictions.

The TRAC data confirm immigration prosecutions in San Diego dropped from 2,243 in 2002 to 1,715 in 2006. Meanwhile, convictions dropped from 1,763 to 1,449 over the five-year period Lam led the office.

• In drug prosecutions, Arizona, New Mexico, San Diego and Seattle were ranked among in the 20 highest number of cases brought. Only Little Rock fell into the bottom third among all 93 U.S. attorneys' offices.

• Seven of the eight districts received mediocre rankings in weapons prosecutions. The exception was Arizona, which prosecuted 199 of the nation's 9,313 weapons cases — the tenth highest in the country.

• None of the eight districts ranked particularly high in bringing terrorism or public corruption cases.

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse attributed the high number of prosecutions and convictions in the border states to immigration cases that inflated overall statistics there. He called the number of immigration convictions last year "the highest ever."
----

Nice. So now they have to "move on," and for goodbye they get the s....est possible thing to put on their resume. And of course, the old and lame excuse of "Clinton did it" (not even true in that case) is on the air again.

 

Alberto Gonzales had denied having personally been involved in the firings of the federal prosecutors: 'Who me? Never, ever.' In the recurring pattern of conduct of the the Bush administration in such matters: Released e-mails contradicted Gonzales' statement, and showed that he led a meeting where the issue was discussed. Oops. Probably poor memory.

When faced with charges the first reaction of the Bushies is a straight faced denial. If the bad news don't go away, they concede a few points and modify the denial -- if still more comes out, they repeat the modified denial approach, but you can count on them to never tell the truth right away.
Just look at this: Former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles on Friday plead guilty to obstructing justice by lying to a Senate committee to questions regarding the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal. It is endemic. I don't wonder why the Democrats insist on hearing Gonzales and Rove or any of their goons under oath. Given the chance, the Bushies will stall, be forgetful, err, and do anything else rather than to ever come out with the truth -- if not implicitly threatened with a perjury charge.

The reason why the Bushies are against a protocoll of the hearings is that then, when they come out of the hearing, their GOPers in the judicial comittee will start to say they heared different things than the Democrats heared - with a transcript the GOPers are denied that option to create dissonance to blur the issue.