Today’s Must Read

Let us meditate on the words “performance related.”

Before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty explained that six of the seven federal prosecutors who were suddenly dismissed last December were axed for “performance related” issues.

Today, McClatchy reports that of those six, five of them “received positive job evaluations before they were ordered to step down.” But there’s an explanation:

A Justice Department official who spoke on behalf of the administration said the dispute might simply be a matter of “semantics.”

“Performance-related can mean many things,” said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because the Privacy Act bars officials from discussing personnel decisions. “Policy is set at a national level. Individual U.S. attorneys around the country can’t just make up their policy agenda.”

So “performance-related” doesn’t necessarily mean that the prosecutors performed badly — it’s just a coded way of saying they were not sufficiently lockstep with policy at the “national level” (although a number of them got no explanation for their dismissal).

And who sets policy at the national level? Well, according to The Washington Post, it’s not the Department of Justice:

One administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing personnel issues, said the spate of firings was the result of “pressure from people who make personnel decisions outside of Justice who wanted to make some things happen in these places.”

Unfortunately for the administration, this story just keeps on going. Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will be briefed again by McNulty behind closed doors, where he’ll present the job evaluations.