Purging Prosecutors

The administration's mishandling of what the blogosphere is calling Purgegate almost boggles the mind.

After all, the president is perfectly entitled to name any U.S. attorneys he wants. They are political appointees.

But the White House is not entitled to dump perfectly good prosecutors because they aren't investigating Democrats aggressively enough. And the administration isn't entitled to sully the reputations of perfectly good prosecutors by saying they are being replaced for "performance" reasons, when the actual reason is to make room for political hacks or, worse, politically compliant lawyers.

It was the administration's lack of candor that turned this into a scandal, complete with incriminating internal e-mails, the resignation of Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, and Chuck Schumer demanding that the AG himself step down.

It didn't help, of course, that Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson waited days to admit they called the U.S. attorney in New Mexico to say, hey, how's that investigation going, and do you think any Dems might be indicted before Election Day?

As an old Justice Department reporter, I can tell you: This thing reeks of the politicization of justice.

And how about the great judgment of Justice Harriet Miers?

Here's the White House acknowledging that Bush mentioned complaints about vote-fraud investigations (which invariably means too many Democrats voting) to Gonzales, his longtime Texas pal, last October.

D. Kyle Sampson, Gonzales's staff guy, wrote of the firing of New Mexico prosecutor David Iglesias: "Domenici is going to send over names tomorrow (not even waiting for Iglesias's body to cool)." Now that's compassionate conservatism! Miers's deputy had written that Domenici's chief of staff was "happy as a clam" over the firing.

Gonzales took some press questions yesterday and tried to stick to a mistakes-were-made line while insisting he knew little about the details. he kept saying that Sampson's job was to "drive" the process. But Sampson, after all, worked for him.

The administration had considered firing all 93 U.S. attorneys after Bush's reelection. That might have been better than this hit-list fiasco.

Chicago Trib: "Gonzales has come under increasingly harsh scrutiny as new information about the politically tinged circumstances of the firings has come to light. And last week, the Justice Department's inspector general issued a scathing report documenting the FBI's abuse of surveillance powers under the USA Patriot Act, raising new questions about Gonzales' ability to lead the nation's chief federal law-enforcement agency."