Prosecutors, like other professionals, develop a code of honor to help them steer through the gray areas. This code of honor consists of a series of habits and understandings to help individual prosecutors know how to behave when loyalty to the law is in tension with loyalty to the president.People in well-led agencies are acutely conscious of this sort of honor code. If you work for, say, George Shultz or Robert Rubin, you will have a daily example of how to behave. If you work for some others, your sense of honor will be fuzzy, at best.
When you look at the prosecutors who were fired by the Bush administration, you see some who were fired for proper political reasons and some who were fired for improper ones. Carol Lam seems to have been properly let go because she did not share the president’s priorities on illegal immigration cases. David Iglesias seems to have been improperly let go because he offended some members of the president’s party.
But what’s striking in reading through the Justice Department e-mail messages is that senior people in that agency seem never to have thought about the proper role of politics in their decision-making. They reacted like chickens with their heads cut off when this scandal broke because they could not articulate the differences between a proper political firing and an improper one.
Moreover, they had no coherent sense of honor. Alberto Gonzales apparently never communicated a code of conduct to guide them as they wrestled with various political pressures. That’s a grievous failure of leadership...
And the White House, instead of trying to restore some proportion, has picked a fight over a transcript. The president says he will allow White House staff to appear before Congress, but not in public, not under oath and not with a transcript. The president apparently expects his supporters to rally behind the sacred cause of No Transcript. In time of war, he’s decided to expend political capital so that his staffers can lie to Congress without legal consequences.
For the record, the paragraph I edited out is a nonsensical attack on Democrats for their behavior so far. Why nonsensical? In the first half of the column, the half that is not excerpted above, he defines two meaning of the word "political." In this context, one is appropriate and one is not. Then, in his attack on Democrats, he uses political as if it only had one meaning. Given that he himself already had argued it does now... And given that Democrats largely revolves around the idea that Bush and Gonzales were acting in the political manner Brooks had already himself deemed scandalous... I didn't really see why I ought to include it. The man directly contradicted himself with that one; I'm just rying to save him some embarrassment.
Heh.
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