Not every serving US Attorney was fired last December, although undoubtedly there were a lot of Rove’s protégés in need of some resume polishing. As Paul Krugman reminds us today in his NY Times column, last Fall, New Jersey’s Democratic Senator, Bob Menendez, was the focus of an investigation by a Bush appointed US Attorney that appears more and more likely to have been purely politically motivated:
For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.
The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.
Mr. Christie’s actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we’ve learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez’s claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.
Hardly surprising, now is it? If Menendez had lost his Senate seat the GOP would still control the Senate. However, as the old saying goes, the shenanagins pulled by US Attorney, and Bush pioneer, Mr. Christie regarding Senator Menendez are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Bush administration’s abuse and misuse of the Department of Justice under Alberto “Abu” Gonzales to attack its political opponents.
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The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.
Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.
Seven times as likely. You could flip a coin, say 375 times in a row each time, for centuries and never come up with such a gross disparity. This abuse of “prosecutorial discretion” by the Bush appointed US attorneys strains the credulity of anyone with even a 6th grade education. It’s clear evidence that, under Mr. Gonzales, the “Justice Department” has become an oxymoron. But that’s what happens when governmental power is given to a partisan political operative to manipulate election outcomes in favor of his own party:
How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: “We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.”
And let’s not forget that Karl Rove’s candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed federal investigations. Last year Molly Ivins reminded her readers of a curious pattern during Mr. Rove’s time in Texas: “In election years, there always seemed to be an F.B.I. investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press. After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.”
Gonzales, the ever faithful Bush retainer, simply did as Bush’s Brain directed him to do. The Brain said screw over local Democrats, so he did. The Brain said leak reports of an investigation regarding Senator Menendez to help the GOP Senatorial candidate in New Jersey, and he did. From a man who delivered “torture doesn’t apply to the United States” memos upon demand, the fact that he was willing to corrupt the Department of Justice for crass domestic political gains should have been expected. The failure of our mainstream media to discern this pattern is also to be expected. The only investigative reporting that goes on these days among the Gang of 500 is investigating which restaurant or bar is the new Beltway hot spot.
As for the Democrats, this should provide even more fuel for the pending impeachment fires, don’t you think? That is, it would if Democrats would only show a little courage and pursue all these violations of the public trust on the part of the President and Vice President to their logical conclusions. But they probably won’t. Still clinging to the siren songs of “centrist” political consultants, Congressional Democrats will likely take the impeachment option off the table once again, even though failing to act now will allow the Bush administration to continue to gin up more of these phony prosecutions against their fellow Democrats.
Democrats. The only party seemingly willing to assist the political assassins sent to kill it off by studiously ignoring the obvious threat they pose to its existence. Or maybe the party, at least at the national level, has a collective death wish. Who knows. But if they don’t act now to impeach, perhaps they deserve to share the fate of the dinosaurs: extinction.
