Sunday, January 21, 2007
Editorial: A case of Justice that stinks
The administration's forced resignations among U.S. attorneys tell the tale of the corrupting influence of unchecked power.
From the RoundTable blog
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This is a new old story, about one of those "little-noticed" provisions in complex legislation that draws attention only when it starts to stink.
The complex law is the Patriot Act. The smelly provision -- one of many, but a noticeable one of late -- is an innocuous-seeming change in the way the executive branch makes interim appointments of U.S. attorneys.
In effect, the change allows the attorney general to replace federal prosecutors without Senate approval.
The Bush administration seems to be using this new power, in part, to rid the Justice Department of prosecutors deep into political corruption investigations and to put political hacks in their place.
Congress should act quickly to strip the law of a provision so ripe for abuse.
Distressingly, lawmakers passed the change without debate last year when the GOP-dominated Congress approved the USA Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act.
The political blog TPMmuckraker.com reports that a spokesman for one of the bill's Republican managers, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, said then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter slipped the new language into the bill at the last minute. Separate measures passed earlier in both houses did not include the change.
U.S. attorneys are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. When appointees leave, voluntarily or not, the attorney general can make an interim appointment that is not subject to a Senate vote.
Formerly, such an appointment could last up to 120 days, after which a local federal district court would name a replacement until the vacancy was filled. Now interim appointments can last indefinitely, at least until the end of a president's term, a process that circumvents the Senate's check on executive power.
That change began stinking after a series of forced resignations that includes the impending departure of Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for San Diego. Lam focused her office's efforts on successfully prosecuting former Rep. Duke Cunningham for corruption.
The head of the FBI's San Diego office bemoans Lam's ouster, saying it will jeopardize a continuing investigation that has touched several Republican lawmakers. He and several former federal prosecutors say her firing smells of politics.
Not so, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insists. He testified at a congressional hearing Thursday, assuring Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy that U.S. attorneys are never removed to retaliate for or interfere with an investigation or court case.
"Sources" suggest other reasons for Lam's firing, from her pursuit of public corruption and white-collar crime at the expense of drug smuggling and gun cases to a poor track record for convictions. Suspicions that politics underlies all would be hard to prove -- but they are also hard to dismiss.
One of Gonzales' interim appointments, after all, is J. Timothy Griffin, since late December the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. His career up to then was spent largely doing "opposition research" -- digging up dirt on Democrats -- for the Republican Party and, from 2005 to 2006, for Karl Rove.
The Justice Department forced Griffin's predecessor to resign.
Such examples illustrate, at the least, the potential for putrefying politics to corrupt the Justice Department's use of truly awesome powers.
Feinstein and Leahy have filed a bill to restore the district court's authority to make interim appointments. Gonzales' protestations of high principle do not persuade. The senators should press on.
