Rove: Prosecutor Purge Is “Normal and Ordinary”The Arkansas Times‘ blog has video of Karl Rove speaking today on the topic of the prosecutor purge. I’ve typed up a transcript of the remarks, but I’ll leave it to readers in comments to point out the many distortions (and some plain lies) in Rove’s comments.
He made the remarks during a Q&A session after giving a speech at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock.
Look, by law and by Constitution (sic), these attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and traditionally are given a four year term. And Clinton, when he came in, replaced all 93 U.S. attorneys. When we came in, we ultimately replace most all 93 U.S. attorneys â there are some still left from the Clinton era in place. We have appointed a total of I think128 U.S. attorneys — that is to say the original 93, plus replaced some, some have served 4 years, some served less, most have served more. Clinton did 123. I mean, this is normal and ordinary.
What happened in this instance, was there were seven done all at once, and people wanted to play politics with it. And itâs served at the disadvantage at the people whoâ¦. Look, some of these were removed for cause. Some of them were policy disagreements. One United States attorney refused to file cases⦠of death penalty case⦠refused to ask for the death penalty, contrary to policy.
Another United States attorney was doing an otherwise excellent job in the San Diego district. [She] refused to file immigration cases⦠at the direction of the Attorney General, she was asked to file, and she said I donât want to make that a priority in my office. Others are (u/i) with performance issues.
But this is the right of any president to appoint people to these offices. They serve at the pleasure of the president. And my view this is⦠unfortunately a very big attempt by some in the Congress to make a political stink about it. And the question is did they have the same reaction if they were in Congress in the 90âs, or did they have the same reaction if they were in the 80âs. Because every president comes in, appoints United States attorneys and then makes changes over the course of their time.
When asked about whether the administration would nominate replacements for the eight fired attorneys:
â¦The old mechanism said that if the Congress didnât act, that in essence a judge would appoint the United States Attorney â we believe that presents some Constitutional challenges and really is not the way that the executive branch ought to be run. But yes, our intention is, for all of seven of these vacancies, to submit a nomination to the United States Congress for their review and confirmation.
Well, I’ll take a crack at least one of the distortions. Former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam testified under oath Tuesday that she was never asked by the Justice Department to change her office’s handling of border cases. In fact, the Justice Department communicated their satisfaction with Lam’s performance on immigration prosecutions in a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) just three months before she was fired.
Update: The Times blog notes “A more observant attendee spotted interim U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin in the audience. He was sitting in the second row, next to the center aisle.” Griffin, of course, is a former aide of Rove’s.
Update: Here’s a reaction from one of those members of Congress making “a political stink,” Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), to Rove’s remarks.
Update: And here’s a reaction from Clintonâs former chief of staff John Podesta.
Update: TPMm Reader (and Washington lawyer) PF takes a good crack at it:
Taking things sequentially in his statement, the notion that “U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president” is true, but irrelevant in this context. Congress is not investigation whether the President has the legal authority to fire these USAs — it is investigating what factors the President permits to influence his judgment. It is one thing to say “I am legally entitled to do X;” it is quite another to expect that you can do X for nefarious reasons and expect to go unchallenged in the political arena by a coordinate branch of government. Given the supine nature of Congress over the past six years, though, I can understand why Rove believed “because the President says so” is a reasonable excuse.
Rove’s reliance on “the president can do it” to try to shut down debate, is specious for another reason. The President, for example, has unfettered rights to pardon people. If President Bush started selling pardons, under Rove’s logic, Congress would have no right or reason to investigate what the President had done. Many Republicans certainly took a different tack with respect to investigating President Clinton’s perhaps-poorly-considered pardon of Marc Rich.
Second, Clinton’s firing of 93 U.S. Attorneys was far less insidious than what happened here. Clinton’s decision was generally applicable to all U.S. Attorneys — you were hired by a different administration and I will replace you without regard to the status of any of your ongoing investigations. No one was spared, and thus no single U.S. Attorneys conduct was at issue. Here, however, Bush has not created a rule of general applicability (i.e., at the beginning of his second term seeking resignation of all U.S. Attorneys). Rather, his administration has apparently systematically chosen to replace U.S. Attorneys who were not malleable enough with respect to particular investigations of individuals or entities allied with the Republican party. There is simply no comparison between these two acts.
