Say Anything Blog

The White House had the temerity, the absolute gall, to pick replacements for the fired US attorneys before they actually fired them.

The Justice Department identified five Bush administration insiders as replacement U.S. attorneys almost a year before most of the prosecutors were fired, contrary to repeated claims that no such list had ever been drawn up, according to documents released today.

E-mails sent to the White House in January and May of 2006 by D. Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, list potential replacements for U.S. attorneys in San Diego, San Francisco, Grand Rapids, Mich., and Little Rock, Ark.

The replacements on the list were all high-level administration insiders, including two who have gone on to different U.S. attorney postings: Jeff Taylor, now chief prosecutor in the District, and Deborah Rhodes, now U.S. attorney in Alabama. The others were Rachel L. Brand, currently head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and Daniel Levin, a former senior Justice and White House official, the memos show.

I am shocked and outraged.  How dare the White House keep a list of potential replacements for US attorneys who aren’t performing their jobs as the administration thinks they should.  Do these people think they’re in charge of the country or something?

All sarcasm aside, I still don’t get this controversy.  Despite the position the Democrats are trying to take right now, US attorneys are very much a political position.  They are political appointees, after all.  Plus, all over this country state and county prosecutors are voted into office each election.  They even run on party tickets.  The Clintons replaced every single one of this nation’s US attorneys when they took office.  Why?  Because they wanted people in those positions who would prosecute according to their policies.  That’s part of what the President does.  Appoints people to federal offices to pursue his (or one day her) policies.

I know we all want to claim the moral high ground and claim that US attorneys aren’t political, but let’s be realistic.  If US attorneys weren’t political they wouldn’t get their jobs through the political process.  Bush did nothing wrong, and this whole controversy is a big nothing.