Mukasey: No Politics at DoJ

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It’s definitely one of Michael Mukasey’s bottom line messages today: He’s no Alberto when it comes to politicization.

When Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) asked him how he would ensure that politics plays no role at the Justice Department, he replied that any attempt by a “political person” to interfere with a case would be “cut and curtailed” and that whoever that person was would be promptly referred to the “very few people at the Justice Department” permitted to take calls from elected officials.

As to whether he might, say, try to fire a group of competent U.S. attorneys because they weren’t “loyal Bushies” and try to replace them with loyalists, or make sure that career employees were also team players, Mukasey said that hiring in the department would be based solely on qualifications, “not whether they had an R or D next to their name.”

And what would he do if such a firing of U.S. attorneys were going on? He’d “get in the middle of it very fast and stop it.”

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