Why I Was Fired

by Jill on 3.21.2007 · 14 comments

Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias pens an article for the Times about being fired for political reasons — and it’s a must-read. This Justice Department scandal is unbelievable. Also, why does Time magazine insist on hiring the most ridiculous columnists in the country?

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{ 14 comments }

1 zuzu 3.21.2007 at 5:48 pm: That second link just goes to a page saying you need Times Select to view the page.
2 Jill 3.21.2007 at 5:53 pm: Fixed!
3 Henry 3.21.2007 at 6:41 pm: I gotta be honest with you, I’m not sure I see what all the fuss is about. Maybe I just don’t know enough about the issue, but unless one of them was investigating the administration, what’s the problem? They serve at the President’s pleasure, he can fire them himself whenever he feels like it.
4 zuzu 3.21.2007 at 6:58 pm: They serve at the President’s pleasure, he can fire them himself whenever he feels like it.

Funny, that’s just what Gonzalez says about it.

Sure, he can fire them, but it sure as hell looks bad when he fires perfectly competent, in some cases excellent, US Attorneys because they won’t investigate Democrats right before an election.

The US Attorney’s office is not the enforcement arm of the Republican Party.

There are also a lot of issues with squirrelly email and record-keeping practices, as well as revelations that the rating of these prosecutors fell to a guy with no relevant experience, who rated Patrick Fitzgerald — a prosecutor universally praised for his competence and professionalism — very low indeed. Which got a huge laugh from his former boss in New York. Probably the only reason he wasn’t actually fired was that people would notice that, seeing as how he was investigating the administration.
5 norbizness 3.21.2007 at 7:06 pm: Henry: Usually, investigating high-level persons in the Administration is the province of a special prosecutor (Fitzgerald/Libby); however, one of the people shitcanned was investigating a Republican lawmaker (Jerry Lewis) and a high-level CIA official; others were being pressured to bring voting fraud indictments against Democratic politicians (where no evidence existed) before the midterm elections, which is what I think happened in Oregon and New Mexico.

Add the lies about performance and the shifting rationale, add a Democratic majority in the Congress to an unpopular, petulant Administration, and voila!
6 Mnemosyne 3.21.2007 at 7:41 pm: Maybe I just don’t know enough about the issue, but unless one of them was investigating the administration, what’s the problem?

Google “Dusty Foggo” and then realize that Carole Lam, the US Attorney who was leading the investigation into Foggo and his ties with convicted former Republican congressman “Duke” Cunningham, was one of the ones who was summarily fired.

Can you see the problem yet? Or is the fact that she was investigating a Bush appointee shortly before she was fired just one of those weird coincidences?
7 Andrew 3.21.2007 at 7:50 pm: Would someone mind explaining for the benefit of the young, foreign and ignorant (well, me) why the NYT columnist was being ridiculous please?
8 Andrew 3.21.2007 at 7:50 pm: (Sorry, Time, not NYT)
9 norbizness 3.21.2007 at 8:54 pm: Andrew:
(1) false equivalence between Clinton (and GHW Bush and Reagan) replacing all US attorneys at the start of their term with GW Bush’s firing of attorneys mid-term;
(2) the unsupported allegation that one of the fired attorneys “was ignoring evidence of voter fraud;” presumably, this was the one in Washington state;
(3) ignoring all of the false justifications thrust forward for the firings, as well as the political involvement of operatives in law enforcement;
(4) actually, point 1 consumes about 90% of his column.
10 evil fizz 3.21.2007 at 9:02 pm: 2) the unsupported allegation that one of the fired attorneys “was ignoring evidence of voter fraud;” presumably, this was the one in Washington state;

I think that’s also a reference to David Iglesias and the allegations about ACORN.
11 zuzu 3.21.2007 at 10:44 pm: The New Yorker has a piece this week on the guy who was appointed US Attorney in the District of Arkansas after his well-regarded predecessor was shitcanned as part of the purge, at the recommendation of Karl Rove. Who, you’ll recall, is the President’s political adviser, not an attorney.

Among this guy’s career highlights:

* He was an opposition researcher for the Republican party, digging up dirt on John Kerry’s first marriage and his parking tickets and spotting trivial inconsistencies in Al Gore’s statements;

* He was an aide to Karl Rove;

* He was involved in “caging” black votes in Florida in the 2004 election, meaning that he challenged black voters for bullshit made-up reasons because they were more likely to vote for Gore, quite potentially a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (which Republicans in Congress resisted renewing last year).

Now, you’d think that this guy would have had some trouble in the confirmation process, what with his obvious lack of prosecutorial experience, his naked partisanship, his sketchy record on voting rights, and the opposition to his nomination by one of the senators from his own state.

You’d think that, but obviously you didn’t read the obscure provisions of the Patriot Act reauthorization:

Griffin, who is thirty-eight, was appointed U.S. Attorney in December. A former research director for the Republican National Committee and an aide to Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, Griffin had relatively little prosecutorial experience. Nonetheless, e-mails between Justice Department and White House officials show that Bush Administration officials pushed out Griffin’s well-respected predecessor, H. E. (Bud) Cummins, to make room for Griffin, in part because “it was important to . . . Karl [Rove], etc.” Griffin did not undergo a confirmation process before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as is required by the Constitution. Instead, the President appointed him under a little-noticed provision of the 2006 renewal of the Patriot Act, which allows for the indefinite appointment of an interim U.S. Attorney without Senate approval. Ostensibly, the provision was intended to be used in situations where national security might be at stake, such as the death of a sitting U.S. Attorney resulting from a terrorist attack.

As early as last summer, Justice Department officials worried that Griffin’s past as an opposition researcher for the Republicans might make him unconfirmable. (A Justice Department staffer wrote in an e-mail, in reference to the plan to install Griffin, “We have a senator prob.”) In congressional hearings last month, Mark Pryor, a Democratic senator from Arkansas, raised concerns about newspaper accounts of Griffin’s political work, which, he said, has “been characterized as ‘caging’ African-American votes. This arises from allegations that Mr. Griffin and others in the R.N.C. were targeting African-Americans in Florida for voter challenges during the 2004 Presidential campaign.”
12 Random Observer 3 3.22.2007 at 12:15 am: Brief summary of the problem:

#1: It is traditional to let go of all attornies at the start of a term. Both Clinton and Bush did this to no outcry.

#2. It is highly unusual to ask specific attornies to resign in mid-term. #1 and #2 are not analogous situations at all.

#3. The emails released discuss a possible political backlash, admit the move is highly unusual, and suggest a PR strategy to mislead the fired attornies about why they were fired. Including this gem:
Q: Why was I fired?
A: You’ve done a good job, but we think it is time to give someone else a chance.
(That is almost verbatim from the emails, the PDFs are online)

#4. In figuring out who they wanted to fire, the Bush staffers referred to the “good” attornies as “loyal Bushies.”

#5. Some of the fired attornies were investigating Republican scandals.

#6. The attornies were lied to about why they were fired.

#7. The attornies were replaced with unqualified people who did not undergo any Congressional approval due to a backdoor in the Patriot Act slipped in by a Congressional aide without their bosses approval. The replacements appear highly partisan. (Loyal Bushies)

#8. This comes at the same time the Justice Department and FBI admit to another abuse of the Patriot Act, obtaining records without authority by pretending there are urgent national security matters.

#9. The attornies being released had gotten good job perf reviews.

The pattern with these recent scandals is pretty clear:

Patiot Act being abused for things that have nothing to do with terrorism.

Replacing qualified people with less-qualified, more partisan people.

#7 above is really the worst. Bush wanted to get people in that wouldn’t pass the approval process so they just bypassed it.

Power corrupts.
13 DAS 3.22.2007 at 10:53 am: Both Clinton and Bush did this to no outcry. – Random Observer 3

Correction: when Clinton did this, the attorneys refused to resign as was the usual custom. When Clinton’s team then let the attorneys, and other political appointees from the previous admins, go, there was actually quite a bit of outcry from the GOP noise machine. This has been well documented, including the hypocrisies involved.

The attornies being released had gotten good job perf reviews.

Why don’t we just say what should already be obvious: Bush & CO so do not care about the rule of law and are so actively opposed to it (for ideological as well as, um, other, reasons) these attorneys might not have been fired for political reasons in spite of getting good job perf reviews, but because they were doing their jobs. Incompetence with these people is not a bug, it is a feature. It isn’t as if they don’t care and have other priorities — they really believe good governance cannot help but have perverse effects and that the rule of law is actually a bad thing (cf. all sorts of conservative “economic” literature about perverse effects as well as certain interpretations of the writings of Paul regarding the idea of rule of law): so for someone to be a highly competent attorney is a bad mark in the eyes of this administration. They really do believe, as did Roper in A Man for All Seasons that you have to cut down the forest of laws to get to the devil, rather than believing that the forest is what protects us from the devil.

It ain’t just a few bad apples at the top — the entire reactionary ideology that has bred this admin is bad to the core: it isn’t that this particular reactionary admin is incompetent (the “incompetence dodge”), it’s that the reactionary ideology which dominates the whole of the GOP right now revels in incompetent governance in the first place. Unless we can articulate that, the GOP can always run on the same rotten ideology by simply saying “we got rid of those bad Bush & CO apples, why don’t you try us again?”.
14 Craig R. 3.22.2007 at 8:54 pm: It is certainly a diferent matter to nuke all the group, at the start of term, than to pick and choose, mid-term, those who are violating your required party loyalty.

As we,, the record shows that, during the course of th Cheny/bush administartion, the ratio of dems being investigated/prosecuted over repubs is about 7-to-1

If anybody wants to look further at how this administtration wants to target the opposition and reward those who curry favor, look at the fact that the GOP lackey who ignored actual winnable cases (and chances to recover taxpayer monies by prosecution) insisted on pushing and refiling complaints about the Clintons in regards to a failed savings and loan, and a land deal *the clintons lost money on*. Because of the emphasis on the CLintons, where no real evidence existed, cases lapsed past the statute of limitations where taxpayer monies could have been recovered from frauds where there were assets to recover.

Bahh