March 9, 2007
The Libby Verdict IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:50 AM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that there are times when an administration should not be in charge of an investigation of governmental wrongdoing, especially when higher-ups in the administration itself or members of Congress are under a cloud. What I object to is appointing someone to function as a prosecutor with only one case and with unlimited resources and unlimited time with which to pursue that case. When such a prosecutor has to do his or her job under intense media and political scrutiny, the pressure to produce scalps can be overwhelming, almost regardless of the evidence, as can be the temptation to keep the investigation going for years in order to stay in the public eye. As someone said, if a man has only a hammer he is likely to find a lot of nails that need to be hit. Instead, I propose the following. Congress should establish, within the Justice Department, a permanent organization to be called, say, the Office of Governmental Integrity. The head of this office would hold the rank of an associate attorney general but would be appointed, like the head of the FBI, to a ten- year, non-renewable term. He could be fired only for cause. This office would handle automatically all cases involving government personnel above a certain level (say, Presidents, Vice Presidents, cabinet members, and members of Congress) and such other cases as the attorney general, on his own or at the direction of the President, should think proper. This would give the necessary appearance as well as reality of complete independence, and would also provide the same constraints that other federal prosecutors have, which is to say, finite (but adequate) resources and time, and more than one case to handle, limiting the tendency to become obsessed. This wouldn’t be a perfect solution (welcome to planet earth) but would be a vast improvement over the idea of a special prosecutor, which, as I said, has proved to be an awful idea. Two other points in reference to Mr. Burns’s post. He writes, “I don’t think Lawrence Walsh was an unmitigated disaster on the scale of Kenneth Starr, but I can understand why conservatives resent his investigation.” Iran-Contra needed to be investigated, but it didn’t require six years’ worth of investigation. I have it on good authority from several members of the legal profession who dealt with him in the past that Lawrence Walsh is a pretty loathsome individual, but that is neither here nor there. What I find unforgivable was his decision to issue indictments of Caspar Weinberger and others and to name George H. W. Bush as an unindicted co-conspirator on the Friday before the presidential election of 1992. The first President Bush was almost certainly political toast at that point anyway, but Walsh’s act was one of pure partisanship. There are no legitimate reasons he could not have issued those indictments two months earlier or five days later. Mr. Burns refers to the “suspicious dismissals of eight United States attorneys” recently. I’m not sure what is suspicious here. U.S. attorneys are not protected by civil service regulations but rather serve at the pleasure of the President, just as do cabinet and sub-cabinet members and White House staff. The President can fire them for cause or for political reasons or because he does not like their taste in neckties. Perhaps they should be under civil service, but that is an argument for another day. What I find amusing here is that the left is making a big deal out of this while trying their best to ignore some rather relevant history. The New York Times the other day editorialized that U.S. attorneys should only be subject to being replaced in office at the beginning of a presidential term. That means, I guess, that it’s okay to fire U.S. Attorneys for political reasons on January 21 of years following leap years but not any of the subsequent 1,460 days of a President’s term. Or perhaps the Times was hoping that no one would notice that President Bill Clinton fired every single U.S. attorney in the country (with the exception of Michael Chertoff in New Jersey, for whom Senator Bill Bradley interceded) as soon as he entered the White House. Why? To replace them with political allies, of course.
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