Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, October 07, 2008 3:29:16 PM
Prepare yourself for another Scooter Libby debacle? “Criminalizing Politics, Again”
Last week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey
tempted fate by appointing a quasi-independent counsel — an
experienced, respected career prosecutor from outside Washington — to
investigate a non-crime inflated to a scandal by Democrats’
demagoguery: the 2006 firing of nine district United States attorneys.
We can only hope the result is not another Scooter Libby debacle.
Mukasey’s hand was forced by Justice’s inspector general, Glenn Fine,
who issued a report for which Democrats and their allies in the
mainstream media have been salivating. Though Fine found no crime in
the termination of the U.S. attorneys, he scalded former Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales for being “remarkably unengaged” in the
process. Gonzales’s underlings, the report finds, ran rampant, allowing
political considerations to factor into the “fundamentally flawed”
termination process.
It bears repeating that the report makes
no claim of criminal wrongdoing. U.S. attorneys are political
appointees. They serve at the pleasure of the president, who can fire
them for any reason or for no reason. Their appointment is inherently
political, and that is precisely how Congress has always wanted it —
with senators of both parties (and the party machinery in each state)
weighing in heavily regarding which lawyers in their districts get
these coveted slots. U.S. attorney removals are a patronage operation,
too — nobody investigated in 1993 when, after twelve years of GOP
administrations, Bill Clinton fired nearly all 93 appointees so he
could fill the slots with Democrats.
Back in August, Mukasey announced he was declining to seek
criminal prosecution against those who violated civil service
regulations by infusing politics into DOJ hiring decisions during
Gonzales’s tenure. As he said at the time, “Not every wrong, or even
every violation of the law, is a crime.” Just so. Obviously, had
Mukasey declined to act on Fine’s report, the next administration’s
attorney general would likely have done so. By acting now, Mukasey was
at least able to choose the special counsel (who will not be fully
independent — she will report to the deputy attorney general). We can
only hope Nora Dannehy, the U.S. attorney from Connecticut whom
he selected, shares Mukasey’s notion of prosecutorial restraint. If
you’re wondering why that’s important, ask Scooter Libby.