Sunday, June 10, 2007
The U.S. attorney scandal matters
Dan Radmacher
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From the RoundTable blog
The current U.S. attorney scandal is one of those multi-layered wonkfests that most people have only scratched the surface of, if that.
On that surface, the scandal is about the firing of nine U.S. attorneys who hadn't proven themselves as "loyal Bushies."
Conservative partisans tried to twist that narrative into something benign, noting that no political scandal ensued when President Clinton fired all 93 U.S. attorneys after he took office. Well, no. That's actually pretty standard procedure. President Bush did the same when he took office.
This scandal is about firing Republican prosecutors who apparently weren't political enough, who didn't take marching orders from Karl Rove and Republican senators. It's about a little-noticed provision slipped into the reauthorization of the Patriot Act that allowed the U.S. attorney general to appoint new U.S. attorneys indefinitely without Senate confirmation. It's about White House interference with the traditional independence of the Justice Department from crass politics.
And it's about attempts to cover up that interference, which may at this point include the illegal use of a parallel Republican National Committee computer system to conduct White House business while avoiding archive requirements for official e-mail.
Peel back another layer, though, and the scandal becomes about a Republican attempt to use bogus vote fraud allegations in key swing states to affect the outcome of the 2006 and 2008 elections.
That's where last week's testimony by the improbably named Brad Schlozman before the Senate Judiciary Committee comes in. Schlozman was named interim U.S. attorney for the western district of Missouri after Todd Graves was forced out.
Graves was the ninth U.S. attorney found to have been fired or forced to resign -- contradicting Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' repeated testimony that there were only eight.
The day before Schlozman appeared, Graves testified that before he was forced out he had been "slow-walking" an investigation of the voter registration practices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now because it was against Department of Justice policy to bring voter-related charges close to an election.
That policy didn't deter Schlozman, when he took over, from obtaining a grand jury indictment against four members of ACORN for alleged voter registration fraud less than a week before the November 2006 election. Under direction from the Justice Department, Schlozman put out a press release calling the indictment part of a national investigation into vote fraud.
Republican groups immediately jumped on the case, accusing Democrats of "trying to steal the election."
During last week's testimony, Schlozman angered Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, when he rejected the notion that a case brought against a liberal activist group days before the election might have an impact on the outcome. "You're amazing," Leahy said. That was clearly not meant as a compliment.
Schlozman, a sniveling character with a voice that sounds like he's been sucking helium, first came to notice in the Bush administration as a political appointee to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
According to Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting rights section, Schlozman did his best to reshape the long-respected division into a partisan tool to reduce enforcement of laws meant to make sure minorities weren't kept from voting.
"Schlozman didn't know anything about voting law. ... All he knew is he wanted to be sure that the Republicans were going to win," Rich told The Boston Globe.
The GOP has been hyping voter fraud as a widespread problem for years. Recently, a federal panel, the Election Assistance Commission, was caught modifying the conclusion of experts that there is "little polling place fraud" around the nation.
That conclusion ran counter to Republican efforts to institute strict voter ID requirements that have been shown to disenfranchise many poor and minority voters. It also made it harder to justify firing these federal prosecutors for not being tough enough in bringing vote fraud charges -- just one of many rationals put forth during the course of the controversy.
So at its essence, the scandal boils down to the Bush administration's decision to fire competent, well-performing U.S. attorneys to replace them with partisan hacks who would work to shift the political momentum in battleground states by bringing bogus election fraud cases.
Wonks aren't the only ones who ought to be interested in that.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
