Here’s a question.
The President has the absolute right to nominate anyone he wants to be an US Attorney. He also has the absolute right to fire an US Attorney. Like granting clemency and pardons, this is an exclusive power of the presidency. So, as the Solicitor General Paul Clement says, Congress doesn’t have the right to look into the president’s internal deliberations on US Attorneys because ‘such deliberations necessarily relate to the potential exercise by the President of an authority assigned to him alone.”
Okay. I can see that and I can see why that is true. But what if Congress suspects that the administration fired the attorneys to obstruct ongoing investigations?
If we look at clemency and pardoning, a president could grant those to someone that was in the process of providing damaging testimony. What if, for example, Bush had offered pardons to Armitage, Rove, and Libby early on in the Plame investigation? Wouldn’t that rightly be considered a bald-faced example of obstruction of justice?
I think we are seeing the same thing here. The suspicion is that US Attorneys were fired for either refusing to improperly indict Democrats or for too aggressively investigating Republicans. Either one of those explanations would rise to the level of an impeachable offense, even if the actual act of firing the attorneys is not a crime.
But that doesn’t answer whether the President can successfully assert executive privilege in this case.
On another front, Think Progress has identified an admission in the Solicitor Generals’ letter to Congress.
Among other things, these communications discuss the wisdom of such a proposal, specific U.S. Attorneys who could be removed, potential replacement candidates, and possible responses to congressional and media inquiries about the dismissals.
This, of course, totally contradicts earlier assertions that the White House didn’t discuss lists, but merely acted on Justice Dept. recommendations.
And Marcy Wheeler points out something else:
Paul Clement, as you’ll recall, is the guy currently in charge of any investigation into the US Attorney firings, since Alberto Gonzales recused himself some months ago. He’s the one who technically oversees the Office of Special Counsel investigation into whether politics played an improper part in Iglesias’ firing or the hiring of career employees in DOJ, he’s the one who oversees the joint Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General investigations into whether anything improper–including obstruction of justice–occurred in the hiring and firing of USAs. And now, he’s the guy who gets to tell the President that he doesn’t have to turn over what might amount to evidence of obstruction of justice in the Foggo and Wilkes case, among others.
It’s all rather sketchy, isn’t it?
The Republicans’ talking point is that the President can do whatever he likes with US Attorneys, but I don’t think that involves monkeying around with ongoing investigations and pressuring prosecutors to bring specious cases against the administration’s political opponents.
The courts will have to decide the law here as far as executive privilege goes. But what’s right is right. And I think determining whether the Justice Dept. has been totally subverted is ‘demonstrably critical’ to the Judiciary Committees in carrying out their oversight responsibilities.
