Iglesiasgate: White House in Full Backpedal

The central legislative shift that enabled the Justice Department to hire and fire US Attorneys without Congressional oversight was a provision tucked into the back of the re-authorized Patriot Act at the last minute. This allowed DoJ to hire interim replacements for the purged prosecutors indefinitely. Well, with the criticism of this purge at a fever pitch, the administration is beating a fast retreat away from that legislation and away from the policy as a whole.

Slapped even by GOP allies, the Bush administration is beating an abrupt retreat on eight federal prosecutors it fired and then publicly pilloried....

The Justice Department is shifting from offense to accommodation.

"In hindsight, we should have provided the U.S. attorneys with specific reasons that led to their dismissal that would have helped to avoid the rampant misinformation and wild speculation that currently exits," Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Friday. "We will continue to work with Congress to reach an accommodation on providing additional information."

It was a striking reversal for an administration noted for standing its ground even in the face of overwhelming opposition.

The Attorney General has even given the go-ahead to change that provision of the Patriot Act and restore Congressional oversight for US Attorneys. I would guess that Gonzales got into a meeting with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, realized exactly how fucked he was, knew that he couldn't stay on the job any longer unless he changed his tune, and came out of it sounding like the Great Conciliator.

It's important to note that none of this would be coming to light under a Republican Congress. There would be grumbling from some circles, but the GOP leadership would dismiss it as politics, and would sweep the whole thing under the rug. Elections have consequences, and in this case, the consequences were great indeed.

The White House was attempting to turn the US Attorney into a political position and an arm of the RNC. In some cases they succeeded in doing so, as Paul Krugman notes.

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

The executive branch has been refigured under this President and turned into an instrument used by a political party to get back at their enemies. Parties have their own infrastructure. They don't need their own branch of government as well.