He did get some very sympathetic and favorable coverage. You tell me, who was the bad guy in the story: Bill Clinton, the guy who committed perjury and conspired with others to commit perjury, or Kenneth Star, the independent counsel who was investigating him? The only guy I ever heard called a "pervert" in the press was Star, for REPORTING on Clinton.
Again, I would disagree with you. Perhaps your memory of this is better than mine. When did the MSM ever attack his methods of "handing conflicts." Could you be a little more specific?
Frankly, I remember the stories after 9/11 of how Clinton was unfortunate that he never had such an opportunity to show "his" leadership ability. Don't mind Oklahoma, the WTC '93, the attempted assassination of President Bush by Iraq, or the U.S.S. Cole...
Do you have any examples of Clinton getting treated unfairly by the media? Are you trying to say that the tone of the press during the 90s was the same as it was during the Bush administration?
I'll consider your opinion, if you provide something resembling a specific or an example. Why did you even post? You said nothing, you didn't support your position and then you made a lame attempt at insulting those who you don't agree with.
Link:
http://www.slate.com/id/2161804
jurisprudence
Hyper Hacks
What's really wrong with the Bush Justice Department.
By Lincoln Caplan
Posted Wednesday, March 14, 2007, at 5:53 PM ET
Our system of government tries to limit the sway of partisan
politics over the law by giving life tenure to federal judges.
But it doesn't do the same for the attorney general or the
lawyers who work for him. They serve at the pleasure of the
president, to whom we grant the legal authority to fire anyone
from his team for any reason.
The straightforwardness of this rule helps explain why the Bush
administration's firing of seven U.S. attorneys at the beginning
of December, plus an eighth last summer, didn't immediately
ignite into controversy.
But what's come out since then makes
clear that this targeted removal of prosecutors was different in
kind as well as degree from political dramas at the Department
of Justice in prior administrations. In the context of other
Bush administration assaults on DOJ lawyers, the U.S. attorney
scandal confirms the administration's disdain for the
nonpolitical tradition of federal law enforcement.
To be sure, the past practices that embodied this tradition
weren't codified. Nor are they legally binding. They're the kind
of custom recorded by anthropologists more than legal scholars,
and they include many exceptions. Yet they have long governed
how federal law-enforcement decisions were made. And they have
been sturdy enough to keep in check the president's authority to
remove lawyers at will for a generation before the current
administration.
The attorney general and the lawyers who work for him represent
the administration that picks them. But their client is the
United States, and the oath they swear is to uphold the nation's
laws and the Constitution. The country's 93 U.S. attorneys
transform from political appointees into public servants when
they join the Justice Department. Once in place, they gain a
significant measure of independence. For most crimes, they have
the power to indict without approval from "Main Justice," the
Washington, D.C. headquarters. This independence is "vital to
ensuring the fair and impartial administration of justice," in
the words of Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney who worked in
the Justice Department for both Republican and Democratic
attorneys general.
The White House and DoJ are now under fire because, in
disrespecting the post of U.S. attorney, they appeared to
interfere with the independence of that office in a way that's
unprecedented.
In the previous quarter-century, according to the
Congressional Research Service, no more than five and perhaps
only two U.S. attorneys, out of 486 appointed by a president and
confirmed by the Senate, have been similarly forced out—in the
middle of a presidential term for reasons not related to
misconduct. "It would be unprecedented for the Department of
Justice or the president to ask for the resignations of United
States attorneys during an administration, except in rare
instances of misconduct or for other significant cause," White
said when she testified in February about the Bush firings
before much was known about them. Previous midterm removals
include those of a Reagan U.S. attorney fired and convicted for
leaking confidential information and a Clinton appointee who
resigned under pressure after he lost a major drug case and
allegedly went to an adult club and bit a topless dancer on the
arm. This time, the stories are quite different.
Why should U.S. attorneys be insulated from presidential
politics? White quoted from a 1940 speech to U.S. attorneys by
Robert Jackson, then attorney general and later Supreme Court
justice: "The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty,
and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion
is tremendous." The power of law enforcement to tarnish
reputations, end people's liberty, and ruin lives, in other
words, is so great that it has to be exercised judiciously and,
above all, nonpolitically. That's one basic element of the rule
of law. U.S. attorneys and other Justice Department lawyers have
lived by the declaration of evenhandedness carved into the
rotunda of the attorney general's office: "The United States
wins its point whenever justice is done its citizens in the
courts."
A previous low point for the Justice Department came almost two
decades ago, during the Reagan years, when the switchboard
sometimes answered, "Ninth Street Disillusionment Center" and
the graffiti "Resign," "Leave," and "Sleaze" were scrawled on
walls near the office of Attorney General Ed Meese. In 1988, six
prominent Republicans resigned. Led by William Weld, then-head
of DoJ's criminal division and later the governor of
Massachusetts, they said they believed that the Justice
Department was too impaired to enforce the law. These political
appointees left behind a dispirited bureaucracy. But Meese
didn't really tamper with the ranks of career attorneys, who
don't normally come and go with the president, or with the
department's basic apparatus for enforcement, including the U.S.
attorneys' offices.
The early Clinton years brought woes of their own, with two
tanked nominees for attorney general before the confirmation of
Janet Reno, and the widespread perception that friendship and
political loyalty were high on the list of qualifications for
senior appointment. But the departure of Associate Attorney
General Webb Hubbell, Hillary Clinton's former law partner and
the department's crony-in-chief, and the arrival of the
Whitewater scandal loosened the department's political leash.
And again, the troubles in the senior political ranks didn't
infect the U.S. attorneys' offices or the career lawyers.
In the Bush years, by contrast, senior political appointees have
applied a political litmus test to the work of career lawyers
and punished them for failing it. William Yeomans, a lawyer in
the department's Civil Rights Division from 1981 until 2005,
told part of this story in Legal Affairs, the magazine I edited.
Many leading career attorneys—they number in the dozens—have
been forced out, removed, or transferred. In a concerted effort
by the Bush administration to remake the career staff, Yeomans
says, these veterans were replaced by the hirees of political
appointees, chosen with no input from the longtime career staff.
Yeomans also recounted the division's retreat from defending
traditional civil rights. Of many examples, the most dramatic
involve lack of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act because the
beneficiaries would likely support Democratic candidates. For
Yeomans and others, working in the Bush administration was very
different from their experience in previous Republican and
Democratic administrations. Most profound was the halting of
conversation between political appointees and career lawyers
that had guided law enforcement in the division and elsewhere in
the department—"government by discussion," former Attorney
General Edward Levi called it. In this administration, political
appointees no longer want career attorneys even to make
recommendations about how a case should proceed, for fear that
ignoring their suggestions could make the politicos look bad.
The dismissal of the U.S. attorneys is a more visible example of
the same purgelike practices. Three of the fired U.S.
attorneys—David Iglesias of New Mexico, Carol Lam of the
southern district of California, and John McKay of the western
district of Washington—were lauded by the Justice Department
before they were fired. Bud Cummins, former U.S. attorney of
Arkansas's eastern district, was told that the only reason he
was being pushed out was to make way for J. Timothy Griffin, a
protégé of Karl Rove and a one-time Republican National
Committee staffer known for his skill at opposition research,
not his legal acumen. According to an e-mail from Kyle Sampson,
the DoJ official who resigned this week over his role in the
firings, getting Griffin appointed "was important to Harriet,
Karl, etc."—Harriet Miers, then-White House counsel, and Karl
Rove, the president's top political adviser. Given Griffin's
thin qualifications for the job, the position of U.S. attorney
was reduced to nothing more than a patronage perk.
Home-state politicians and White House officials clearly had a
hand in other firings. Allen Weh, chairman of the New Mexico
Republican Party, told McClatchy newspapers that in 2005, he
urged Karl Rove to have Iglesias fired because he failed to
indict some Democrats for voter fraud. Iglesias testified that
Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, both Republicans
from New Mexico, "leaned on" him for the same reason. In each
instance, there was direct and, to Iglesias, sickening political
interference. The facts add up to retaliation for a decision not
to prosecute, which stabs at the heart of prosecutorial
discretion.
As for Lam, she successfully prosecuted and convicted on
corruption charges former Republican and San Diego Rep. Randy
"Duke" Cunningham. Yesterday on the Senate floor, Arlen Specter,
the Republican from Pennsylvania, asked whether she was
dismissed because she was "about to investigate other people who
were politically powerful." And former U.S. Attorney John McKay
felt that he was under pressure from the office of Doc
Hastings, a Republican congressman from Washington.
Were Iglesias and McKay fired for not indicting enough
Democrats? Lam for threatening to bring down too many
Republicans? We don't know for sure. But the lesson of some of
the firings could be: Woe to the U.S. attorney who didn't
enforce the law as political hacks in the Bush administration
dictated. Political directives like this flout the tradition of
nonpolitical law enforcement that's essential because of the
awesome power of prosecutors. The uproar over the firings seems
to have taken the administration by surprise, and it's possible
they resulted from incompetence as much as cunning. But an
administration's use of law enforcement for political ends has
rarely seemed more brazen.
Lincoln Caplan, the former editor of Legal Affairs, is the
author of The 10th Justice: The Solicitor General and the Rule
of Law and other books on the law.
Photograph of former U.S. attorneys by Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Images.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
