Attorney General Alberto Gonzales just can’t seem to catch a break.
If things had gone his way, the ballooning scandal over the political firings of eight federal prosecutors would have ended the day his terse op-ed brushing the matter aside appeared in USA Today. “They simply lost my confidence,” he wrote on March 7 of the attorneys. “I hope that this episode ultimately will be recognized for what it is: an overblown personnel matter.”
But evidence has emerged that Gonzales lied about approving the plan to fire the attorneys, one of his top aides chose to take the Fifth Amendment rather than testify in front of Congress, and Democrats and Republicans alike are calling for Gonzales’ resignation.
To be sure, this scandal showcases Gonzales’s faults and makes a strong case for his removal. But Gonzales’ involvement is only the beginning of it; the improper firings of these eight attorneys are indicative of the Bush administration’s consistent abuse of government agencies for political gains.
The head of the General Services Administration, for example, is the subject of a congressional investigation seeking to ascertain whether she tried to use her agency to assist Republican candidates. Several witnesses have stated that during a meeting with a White House deputy working under Karl Rove, GSA administrator Lurita Alexis Doan asked political appointees at the GSA how they could “help ‘our candidates’ in the next elections,” the Washington Post reported.
In another instance, the prosecutor in charge of the Department of Justice’s tobacco lawsuit, Sharon Y. Eubanks, has claimed that prosecutors in the DOJ loyal to Bush pushed her to weaken her case, according to the Post. “The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said,” Eubanks told the Post. “And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public.”
Eubanks hits the nail on the head: in all three cases, the Bush administration undermined the effectiveness of the governmental agencies for its own gain. Federal prosecutors can’t fully enforce the law if they’re worried about the political implications of their investigations. When the GSA spends more time giving G.O.P. candidates a leg up, it spends less time administering federal agencies, its actual mission. Since he took office, President Bush ruthlessly expanded his power—these recent events just reinforce that the means he’s willing to go to have no bounds.
One needs to look no further than the internal documents released by the Department of Justice to grasp the mentality which would lead to these scandals. An e-mail written by a DOJ staffer in response to a question from Karl Rove details the plan to replace prosecutors whose actions weren’t in lockstep with the administration while retaining “loyal Bushies.” A mindset that values partisan loyalty over competence will invariably result in the trouble now facing Bush.
Still, the full facts of the prosecutor firings are not known to the public. President Bush offered on March 20 to have aides and members of the Justice Department testify before Congress, only not under oath, closed to the public, and not on the record, repeatedly referring to this as a “reasonable proposal.” If only calling something reasonable made it so—witnesses testifying under these conditions could lie and members of Congress would neither have a record of it nor be able to hold the witnesses accountable.
Luckily, Congress hasn’t taken the bait. Committees in both the House and the Senate have authorized subpoenas for members of the DOJ in continuing investigations. Hopefully the investigations will continue until Gonzales has been removed from a position he never should have held in the first place and the full extent of the Bush administration’s corruption has been uncovered. Maybe then the administration will finally understand that it has a duty to serve not just the President and the Republican Party, but the American people as well.
