Let’s go back to comments Karl Rove made on March 15 about the U.S. Attorney scandal:
When we came in in 2001, we reviewed all 93 U.S. Attorneys and over the course of time, replaced virtually all of them with appointees by the president⦠not all: several appointees were involved in high profile cases, important investigations, and as a result, even though they were appointees of the previous administration, we left them in office for, in some instances, years.
Let’s assume that’s true (and I seem to recall that Mary Jo White, in the Southern District of New York, may have been one of those handling several high-profile cases who stayed on for a time after Bush took office). It would certainly be good practice to take into account the status of investigations, especially important high-profile investigations, before potentially disrupting those investigations by replacing a U.S. Attorney.
If the Bush Administration took into account the status of ongoing investigations when removing U.S. Attorneys back in 2001, then surely it continued that practice this time around with the purge of the Gonzales 8, right? After all, Carol Lam’s Duke Cunningham investigation, and its spin-off cases, is among the highest-profile congressional corruption investigations since ABSCAM. It is a sprawling probe that led into the CIA and into the congressional appropriations process which was so thoroughly corrupted under Republican rule.
But in the documents released by the Justice Department which I have reviewed, I have not seen any sort of reference to the impact of the dismissals on ongoing investigations. No mention of it being taken into consideration. No sign of internal discussions about ensuring that the continuity of the investigations were maintained. No reference to deliberations over the allocation of manpower and resources. In short, nothing to suggest that disrupting major high-profile investigations was an outcome to be avoided.
In fairness, DOJ would probably have grounds for not releasing to Congress any information pertaining to ongoing criminal investigations, so I would not necessarily expect to see any case-specific discussions in the documents released thus far. But you would expect to see some discussions generally of how to handle the effect of these dismissals on the operations of the department and its U.S. Attorney offices. (For TPM readers still making their way through the latest document dump, please be on the lookout for any such documents.) In contrast, the documents reveal extensive internal discussions of how to manage the political consequences of the dismissals.
Lots of attention has rightly been paid to another dog that did not bark: the lack of a department paper trail for the alleged “performance-related problems” that the officials claim were the basis for the dismissals. But in a scandal where the worst suspicion is that the dismissals were intended to impede ongoing public corruption investigations of Republicans, the absence in the record of any reference to the effect the dismissals might have on those investigations seems like a particularly glaring omission.
On a related note, the fact that Carol Lam was one of the dismissed U.S. Attorneys makes Alberto Gonzales’ self-professed distance from the process all the more curious. Might the attorney general not want some input on the dismissal of the prosecutor handling one his department’s most important cases? As Chuck Schumer has said, either Gonzales knew about the purge and sanctioned it, which is bad, or he didn’t know about it, which is worse.
What is not in the DOJ documents may say as much about this scandal as what is there.
