The scandal over the firings of US Attorneys continues to grow, and while I’ve been sitting this one out, some recent articles have pushed me off the sidelines. (For background and a round-up, see Joe Gandelman’s post.)
There’s a growing chorus of “… but that’s just what’s done! Look, see! Bill did it, too!” from defenders — and there’s some truth to that.
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration and its defenders like to point out that President Bush isn’t the first president to fire U.S. attorneys and replace them with loyalists.
While that’s true, the current case is different. Mass firings of U.S. attorneys are fairly common when a new president takes office, but not in a second-term administration. Prosecutors are usually appointed for four-year terms, but they are usually allowed to stay on the job if the president who appointed them is re-elected.
Having witnessed wholesale cleansings of staff by incoming politicians (at a vastly lower, and more local, level than the Department of Justice), I see this as a pretty common — if ugly — practice, and it strikes me as a technicality to object to these, specifically, because of their timing.
But the need to point to Clinton (a common symptom of one form of PDS) has apparently overtaken rationality, as evidenced by the Wall Street Journal’s editorialists (Opinion Journal):
As it happens, Mrs. Clinton is just the Senator to walk point on this issue of dismissing U.S. attorneys because she has direct personal experience. In any Congressional probe of the matter, we’d suggest she call herself as the first witness–and bring along Webster Hubbell as her chief counsel.
As everyone once knew but has tried to forget, Mr. Hubbell was a former partner of Mrs. Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock who later went to jail for mail fraud and tax evasion. He was also Bill and Hillary Clinton’s choice as Associate Attorney General in the Justice Department when Janet Reno, his nominal superior, simultaneously fired all 93 U.S. Attorneys in March 1993. Ms. Reno–or Mr. Hubbell–gave them 10 days to move out of their offices.
Evidently, Hubbell was Bill and Hillary’s choice. As in… the president and his wife’s choice.
So — does that mean that we can expect some examination of other spouses? Perhaps Nancy and Laura knew, and/or were associated with, Justice appointees during their co-habitation of the White House?
After all, the wives are always in it up to their necks. Did we learn nothing from Watergate?