The politicization of the Justice Department has been especially acute in the Civil Rights Division, an issue we explored at some length yesterday. Today’s L.A. Times has more on the complaints coming from veteran lawyers in that division:

“The political decision-making process that led to the dismissal of eight United States attorneys was standard practice in the Civil Rights Division years before these revelations,” Joseph D. Rich, recently retired head of the division’s voting rights section, said in a sparsely attended House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing last week.

“This connection should not be minimized,” he said. . . .

Rich, a 37-year department veteran, said a partisan litmus test in hiring and decision-making has undermined a tradition of nonpartisan professionalism in the division.

“Unfortunately, since this administration took office, that professionalism and nonpartisan commitment to the historic mission of the division has been replaced by unprecedented political decision-making,” he told the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties on Thursday.

Another Bush legacy: partial justice, which is no justice at all.

Here’s a nice run-down from the Post on what several of the fired US Attorneys said on the Sunday shows this morning.

We learned more details today about the dismissal of Seattle-based U.S. Attorney John McKay.

The AP has put together a timeline of events surrounding McKay’s dismissal which provides additional insights into why McKay was left off a list of nominees last year for an open federal district judgeship in Washington State even before the Department of Justice asked for his resignation as U.S. Attorney:

A close friend in the White House counsel’s office – McKay won’t say who – told him the administration believed Republican members of the judicial selection commission opposed him for not diligently investigating claims of voter fraud during the 2004 governor’s election, which Republican Dino Rossi lost by 129 votes after two recounts.

“That was what they understood as being the reason I was not selected,” McKay said. “That was the first I had heard inside the White House that they were concerned about this.” . . .

McKay called Harriet Miers, then the White House counsel, in August and asked for an interview with the intent of correcting the record and making his case for the judgeship. . . .

Miers agreed to interview him. McKay met with her and other White House lawyers on Aug. 22.

Their first question, McKay said, was “Why would the Republicans oppose you?”

On today’s Meet the Press, McKay repeated that version of events, telling Tim Russert, “[T]hey actually asked me why Republicans in the state of Washington would be angry with me.” As the Washington Post noted this evening, that characterization of McKay’s meeting with the Miers seems to further implicate the White House in a political purge:

McKay’s disclosure of an explicit White House question about the damage his decision caused to his standing among party loyalists added new detail to his previous statement that Miers accused him of having “mishandled” the voter fraud inquiry.

The use of the phrase “mishandled” left open the possibility that White House officials — who last September were weighing whether to recommend McKay for a federal judgeship — merely disputed McKay’s professional judgment. McKay’s statement yesterday instead lent new credence to suspicions that partisan political concerns weighed heavily in his subsequent firing.

It probably didn’t help McKay that many Washington State conservatives mistakenly thought he had worked for the Clinton Administration:

Known as “Johnny” to friends and family, John McKay served as president of the Legal Services Corp. in Washington, D.C., before being named U.S. attorney. The Legal Services Corp. was created by Congress in 1974 as a private nonprofit corporation to provide legal services to the poor.

Though McKay headed Legal Services Corp. during the Clinton administration, he wasn’t appointed by the president and didn’t work for the administration. Even so, Vance and others said the perception among conservatives was that McKay had worked for the Clinton administration.

“I knew who he was,” Tom McCabe, executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington, said of John McKay. “He worked in the Clinton administration.”

McCabe was one of those who publicly called for McKay’s firing after he declined to investigate the governor’s race. The Republican-controlled Congress in the 1990s sought to eliminate the Legal Services Corp., and McKay worked with Gorton and Dicks, among others, to save it.

Tony Williams, Gorton’s former chief of staff, recalled that when passions were running high following the 2004 governor’s race, McKay’s connection to Legal Services and mistaken connection to the Clinton administration raised some eyebrows in conservative circles.

“If people Googled him and saw he ran Legal Services … I can only imagine what my more conservative friends thought,” Williams said.

One can only imagine.

For some, it is a matter of outrage that President Bush has renewed his support for Alberto Gonzales even after new evidence has emerged that the Attorney General has repeatedly lied about the US Attorney Purge. Myself, I see it more as a matter of confirmation and almost a welcome one in that it confirms the nature of the debate we’re having.

This isn’t a case where Alberto Gonzales has fallen short of the president’s standards or bungled some process. This is the standard. The Attorney General has done and is doing precisely what is expected of him.

Consider this.

When Alberto Gonzales went up to the Hill earlier this year and answered questions about the US Attorney firings, he lied about why they’d been fired. When evidence revealed that what he had told the Senate was not true, he told the country in his televised press conference that he hadn’t been directly involved in the process and thus had not knowingly misled the Senate. Friday’s document dump showed that that too was a lie. These of course are only the most conspicuous examples and I leave aside the numerous instances of his aides lying on his behalf.

It is not too much to say that everything that has come out of Alberto Gonzales’ mouth on this issue has been a lie. Sure, that sounds like hyperbole. But it’s just a factual summary of what the public record now shows. On the very day his second lie was being exposed Gonzales was publicly claiming “it’s reckless and irresponsible to allege that these decisions were based in any way on improper motives.”

And the president is fine with all of this. Fine with the fact that the Attorney General has not only repeatedly lied to the public but has also been exposed as repeatedly lying to the public. He’s fine with at least two US Attorneys being fired for not giving in to pressure to file bogus charges to help Republican candidates.

Of course he’s fine with it. Because it comes from him. None of this is about Alberto Gonzales. This is about the president and the White House, which is where this entire plan was hatched. Gonzales was just following orders, executing the president’s plans. This is about this president and this White House, which … let’s be honest, everyone on both sides of the aisle already knows.

Given the amount of attention we’ve given to the US Attorney Purge, there’s been no end of right-wing nutjobs who’ve written in asking just what the big deal is. In most cases, these are just attacks dressed up as questions. And I do my best — not always successfully — to ignore them. But interspersed in that mess of emails are a few who seem to be asking, genuinely, what the big deal is. Perhaps they’re critics of the president or conservatives who genuinely don’t see it. So here’s how I’d answer that question.

For all the intensity and hostility awash in our politics, there are some lines we just assume aren’t going to be crossed, lines that are so basic that the civil compact itself can’t easily survive if they’re not respected.

One of those is the vote. Whoever’s in power and however intense things get, most of us assume that the party in power won’t interfere with the vote count. We also assume that the administration won’t use the IRS to harrass or imprison political opponents. And we assume that criminal prosecutions will be undertaken or not undertaken on the facts.

Yes, there’s prosecutorial discretion. And the grandstanding, press-hungry DA is almost a cliche. But when a politician gets indicted for corruption we basically all assume it’s because they’re corrupt — or, given the assumption of innocence, that the prosecution is undertaken because the prosecutor believes their case is strong and that the defendent committed the crime.

Now, again, life is made of grey areas. And our laws and regulations often take into account that even people of good faith may not be able to impartially investigate their own. That’s why we had the Independent Counsel statute. The partisan affiliation of prosecutors and judges often hangs in the background of cases. And probably most Democrats and Republicans feel a bit better when a member of their party is brought down by a prosecutor of the same party because then you can assume — whatever fairness or unfairness may have been involved — that partisanship wasn’t a factor.

So, all of this is to say that no system is perfect and partisan affiliation may distort the justice system at the margins.

But none of what we’re seeing here is at the margins. What we seem to see are repeated cases in which US Attorneys were fired for not pursuing bogus prosecutions of persons of the opposite party. Or vice versa. There’s little doubt that that is why McKay and Iglesias were fired and there’s mounting evidence that this was the case in other firings as well. The idea that a senator calls a US Attorney at home just weeks before a federal elections and tries to jawbone him into indicting someone to help a friend get reelected is shocking. Think about it for a second. It’s genuinely shocking. At a minimum one would imagine such bad acts take place with more indirection and deniability. And yet the Domenici-Iglesias call has now been relegated to the status of a footnote in the expanding scandal, notwithstanding the fact that there’s now documentary evidence showing that Domenici’s substantial calls to the White House and Justice Department played a direct role in getting Iglesias fired.

So what you have here is this basic line being breached. But not only that. What is equally threatening is the systematic nature of the offense. This isn’t one US Attorney out to get Democrats or one rogue senator trying to monkey around with the justice system. The same thing happened in Washington state and New Mexico — with the same sort of complaints being received and acted upon at the White House and the Department of Justice. Indeed, there appears to have been a whole process in place to root out prosecutors who wouldn’t prostitute their offices for partisan goals.

We all understand that politics and the law aren’t two hermetically sealed domains. And we understand that partisanship may come into play at the margins. But we expect it to be the exception to the rule and a rare one. But here it appears to have become the rule rather than the exception, a systematic effort at the highest levels to hijack the Justice Department and use it to advance the interest of one party over the other by use of selective prosecution.

Today’s Must Read: My boss lied to Congress and emails show I knew it? Don’t blame me, blame my thumb.

Hey, if Al Gore can do it…

Defeated conservative Senator Rick Santorum plans new documentaries on “leftists” and “radical Islam.”

Politicization at the GSA, politicization at the Justice Department… Could there be a connection?

It’s looks like we’ve got yet another excuse for why Cunningham prosecutor Carol Lam was fired. And this new excuse comes from someone who’s name almost certainly came up in the Cunningham investigation. More soon.

As mentioned below, now we’ve got yet another excuse for why former San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam was fired.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) says the problem was that she wasn’t aggressive enough prosecuting lower-level drug cases.

Now, Hunter’s rationale for Lam’s dismissal is of particular interest because he is among that small group of sitting members of Congress who worked closely with Cunningham on bagging those earmarks for which Cunningham was later sent to the slammer. Hunter has never been directly accused of wrongdoing. But he was deeply tied in to the Wilkes-earmark clique. So there’s little doubt he would have felt the heat emanating from Lam’s investigation.