Today’s Must ReadAnd it gets even better.
The Justice Department has long argued that it fired the eight U.S. attorneys because of performance concerns — a contention that’s been so thoroughly discredited that it’s a punchline now.
But it appears that we’ve reached a new level of DoJ ridiculousness.
One of the senior Justice Department officials involved in the firings is Bill Mercer, the U.S. Attorney for Montana who pulls double duty as the principal associate deputy attorney general in Washington, D.C. Well, I say double duty, but he really doesn’t seem to spend much time as U.S. attorney: just three days per month, according to congressional testimony.
The chief judge in Mercer’s district has been complaining about his absence for years, at one point berating him during a court hearing: “You have no credibility — none…. Your office is a mess.” And that judge did what he could to get Mercer thrown out, even writing to Alberto Gonzales in 2005 that Mercer was violating federal law by not living in the district of which he was supposedly U.S. attorney.
So what did Mercer do? He changed the law. From The Washington Post:
[In November of 2005] Mercer had a GOP Senate staffer insert into a bill a provision that would change the rules so that federal prosecutors could live outside their districts to serve in other jobs, according to documents and interviews
Congress passed the provision several months later as part of the USA Patriot Act reauthorization bill, retroactively benefiting Mercer and a handful of other senior Justice officials who pull double duty as U.S. attorneys and headquarters officials….
…[T]he new legislation was added to the Patriot bill at the request of Mercer, who had been assigned the task of shepherding the provision through Congress, according to congressional aides and new statements from one of Mercer’s colleagues.
(TPM reported on this provision last month, but we didn’t know Mercer was responsible for it.)
This is, of course, the same Patriot Act that contained the provision that allowed the administration to indefinitely appoint interim U.S. attorneys. So it was full of treats for the administration.
The punchline here, of course, is that the Justice Department officials have straight-facedly claimed that U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias was fired because he was absent from the office one month out of the year (for his Navy reserve duty). He was, they claimed, an “absentee landlord.” And yet one of the officials responsible for the firings had the law changed so that he could still be the U.S. attorney while being all but completely absent from his district. Funny, huh?
Note: For those of you who are suspicious that Mercer and others are drawing two salaries — a Justice Department spokesman told The Washington Post that the U.S. attorneys continue to draw their U.S. attorney salary and are not paid extra for the executive positions.
Update: A TPM Reader jumps in on the salary question:
Of course they’re not getting two salaries — they’re each working a single full-time job, just with a wide array of distinct responsibilities that regularly require travel. The question is whether they’re getting their housing and other expenses subsidized. DOJ has two different set-ups for employees on “detail” from one position to another: some have their housing, etc., paid for in the secondary location on the condition that they continue to maintain a primary residence ( i.e., they pay for a house/apartment as usual in their home city, and the government pays for housing in Washington, along with a generous per diem allowance for food that assumes the person is eating every meal in a restaurant); others don’t get that treatment, on the assumption that they spend such a large majority of time in one city or the other that they don’t need to maintain two residences. The first is a much sweeter deal, for obvious reasons — it would be interesting to know which kind Mercer and the others are getting. Saying that they’re not getting double salary may be a dodge to hide the fact that their total compensation is in fact much higher than it would be if they were staying at home and attending to their duties as US Attorneys on a full-time basis.
