Mr. Joshua Marshall sees the forest through the trees regarding U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, the now-fired prosecutor of incarcerated U.S. Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham:
“What people tend to overlook is that for most White House’s a US attorney involved in such a politically charged and ground-breaking corruption probe would have been untouchable, even if she’d run her office like a madhouse and was offering free twinkies to every illegal who made it across the border. Indeed, when you view the whole context you see that the idea she was fired for immigration enforcement is just laughable on its face. No decision about her tenure could be made without the main issue being that investigation.”
The job of a U.S. attorney is to successfully prosecute those who have broken federal law. Res ipsa loquitur.
U.S. Attorney Lam did this — and up to her recent firing — was doing this in spades.
So how could Ms. Lam be fired for “performance problems” ?
For putting U.S. Congressmen into jail for committing serious crimes while in office?
Wouldn’t this be called exemplary performance by any metric of prosecutor effectiveness?
So putting people in jail who committed substantial and damaging crimes is now a bad thing?
And a “performance problem” ?
These are the questions Mr. Gonzales, the White House and Congressional Republicans now must answer.
Is putting Congressmen who break the law into jail now grounds for the dismissal of a U.S. Attorney ?
How is what Mr. Gonzales has done different from what Richard Nixon asked Attorney General Elliott Richardson to do about special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox ?
What role does Mr. Gonzales now play in the Bush White House, as its walls begin to creak and plaster chips fall from the ceiling into the tomato soup ?
Mr. Robert Bork, meet your doppelganger, Mr. Gonzales.
Postscript:
The firing of 8 U.S. attorneys in quick succession carries the stench of the “multi-tasking approach” the Bush administration used to justify invading Iraq: rely on overlapping, internally contradictory explanations to cover the logical flaws in the whole thing and each part of the whole thing, respectively.
As Mr. Joshua Marshall points out, Alberto Gonzales could not just fire U.S. Attorney Carol Lam without it looking like an obvious move to quash a corruption investigation that is politically damaging to the Republican party.
The solution?
Lump Ms. Lam’s firing in with a whole bunch of others and let the resultant flotsam and jetsam confuse and conceal what had just occurred until the debris has either sunk or floated well down past the river bend.
And hand some nice plum appointments to loyal staffers as a way of keeping them loyal and not so apt to jump ship and bite back (the image of mollifying hyenas suddenly comes to mind, I don’t know why).
Thoughts ?
