The Zong

I’m not sure what we’ll end up calling this brewing scandal. “Wrongfully Terminated Federal Prosecutergate” has a certain ring to it, but I’ll abide by whatever Fox News wants to call it.

Six fired U.S. attorneys testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that they had been the target of complaints, improper telephone calls and thinly veiled threats from a high-ranking Justice Department official or members of Congress, both before and after they were abruptly removed from their jobs.

In back-to-back hearings in the Senate and House, former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico and five other former prosecutors recounted specific instances in which some said they felt pressured by Republicans on corruption cases. One said he was warned by a Justice official to keep quiet or face retaliation.

Technically, Alberto Gonzales and President Bush can hire and fire whomever the hell they want for these jobs, and they don’t have to give reason one for doing it. Trouble is, some of these prosecutors - most of whom are conservative appointees - got their knickers in a twist when the Gonzales claimed the firings were performance related.

“It should never have come to this,” said John McKay, former U.S. attorney for the Seattle-based western district of Washington, who was among those fired and is now an adjunct law professor at the Seattle University law school. “I resigned quietly and left. But when they started saying it was for ‘performance reasons,’ I couldn’t keep quiet any more.”

Whoops. Turns out that the paper trail here suggests that there were no real problems with these attorneys’ performance, after all.

Internal Justice Department documents, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, show evaluations offering positive reviews for all the prosecutors’ work as recently as last March. Mr. Gonzales said the written reviews were among several factors the department used to evaluate prosecutors, which include numbers and types of prosecutions and management issues.

It’s a scary thing when the executive branch of our government decides to throw the Justice Department under the bus for political gains. Back in the good ol’ days, Nixon basically fired everyone in the country who had a law degree in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” (Begin time-warpy sounds)

In the most traumatic government upheaval of the Watergate crisis, President Nixon yesterday discharged Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus.

The President also abolished the office of the special prosecutor and turned over to the Justice Department the entire responsibility for further investigation and prosecution of suspects and defendants in Watergate and related cases.

(End time-warpy sounds)

So while this new move by the Bush Administration doesn’t on the face of it seem as drastic or quite as dirty as things got in the 70s, It’s fair to say that the details being provided by these prosecutors paint an unseemly picture of an administration willing to short-circuit any judicial continuity without any compunction, and one willing to actually make threats against those who might go public with it.

A fired federal prosecutor told a Senate committee Tuesday that he felt “leaned on” and sickened as Republican Sen. Pete Domenici hung up on him in disgust last fall when told that indictments in a corruption case against Democrats would not be issued before the fall elections.

“He said, ‘Are these going to be filed before November?”’ former federal prosecutor David Iglesias, one of eight U.S. attorneys summarily fired in recent months, told the panel. “I said I didn’t think so. And to which he replied, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ And then the line went dead.”

Damn, that’s rude. I guess they don’t call him Domenici for nothing.

The Bush administration also applied a heavy hand after the firings of eight prosecutors became public and some of the dismissed U.S. attorneys had been quoted in media, according to one of those ousted, Bud Cummins of Arkansas.

Cummins’ e-mail also shed light on the way some of those who were fired saw the dismissals. If they voluntarily agreed to testify before Congress, “they would see that as a major escalation of the conflict meriting some kind of unspecified form of retaliation,” Cummins wrote in the Feb. 20 e-mail.

Now, I’m not a very good lawyer, but I think it’s safe for me to assume that U.S. Attorneys have a lot of stuff on their plate already without having some rude-ass Bush crony calling them up to try and get them to discuss sealed indictments. Maybe none of this is criminal, but it certainly calls into further question the integrity of this Justice Department and how effective it can be if all the attorneys working for it feel like they could lose their jobs if they don’t prosecute Democrats fast enough. Along with Scooter Libby’s conviction for lying and obstructing justice, this is looking like a pretty twisted time for America’s judicial system as a whole.

- M.G.