Josh Marshall keeps asking the right questions:
Let's take a look at one of the key lines of questioning that Alberto Gonzales is sure to face during his hearing tomorrow...
The seven U.S. attorneys fired in December, Gonzales wrote (apparently excluding Cummins), "simply lost my confidence." The whole scandal was "an overblown personnel matter."But why had those U.S. attorneys lost his confidence? Did Gonzales even know?
To date that's a question that Gonzales has been either unable or unwilling to answer. Tomorrow we'll find out which of those two options it actually is. Either way, I don't see how he can possibly keep his job. Except, of course, for the fact that Bush isn't likely to force him to leave, and Gonzales isn't likely to choose on his own to go.
President before party, party before country. What a mess.
UPDATE: In case you missed it over the weekend, Daniel Metcalfe, a senior attorney at the Dept of Justice who retired in January after 35 years of service, has an interview in Legal Times that is a must read. Metcalfe argues that Gonzales hasdone more to damage the independence and professionalism of the DoJ than any other Attorney General he has known. Here's an excerpt:
Ever since the Watergate era, when Edward Levi came in as attorney general to replace former Sen. William Saxby soon after Nixon resigned, the Justice Department maintained a healthy distance between it and what could be called the raw political concerns that are properly within the White House's domain. Even Reagan's first attorney general, William French Smith, did not depart greatly from the standard that Levi set; as for Meese, I knew him to be more heavily involved in defending himself from multiple ethics investigations than in bringing the department too close to the White House, even though he came from there.
More recently, of course, the DOJ-White House distance hit its all-time high-water mark under Janet Reno, especially during Clinton's second term. And even John Ashcroft made it clear to all department employees that, among other things, he held that traditional distance in proper reverence; he proved that this was no mere lip service when, from his hospital bed, he refused to overrule Deputy AG Comey on what is now called the "terrorist surveillance program." Especially in the wake of 9/11, which strongly spurred the morale and dedication of Justice Department employees, myself included, I saw only a limited morale diminution in general during the first term.But that strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip -- through their public affairs, legislative affairs and legal policy offices, for example, as well as where you ordinarily would expect such a connection (i.e., Justice's Office of Legal Counsel). I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren't even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.
This matters greatly to Justice Department employees of my generation. They are now the senior career cadre there, with the high-grade institutional knowledge that carries the department from one administration to the next, and when they see a new attorney general come from the White House Counsel's Office with a wave of young "Bushies" in tow and find their worst expectations quickly met, they just as quickly lose respect for nearly all of the department's political leadership, not to mention that leadership's "policy concerns." That respect is a vital thing, as fragile as it is essential, and now it's gone.
The damage this administration has done to our government will take decades to repair.
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