Once again, President Bush is showing how little respect he has for constitutional checks and balances—and at the same time, how much the country still needs them.
Last December, the Department of Justice forced eight U.S. attorneys to resign without cause, firing six on a single December day. It used to be that a president could only make interim appointments for 120 days, and if a candidate was not presented for confirmation by the Senate in that time frame, a lcal district court appointment temporarily filled the position until a candidate was confirmed.
Not anymore. A little-noticed provision in the USA PATRIOT Act revisions passed last year eliminated these checks and balances and gave the U.S. attorney general the authority to fill interim positions indefinitely. Now a president can appoint under-qualified partisans to serve out the remainder of the administration's term. Even more troubling, President Bush can now shield wrongdoers within the administration from independent-minded prosecutors, including those who were overseeing significant public corruption investigations at the time they were forced to resign.
A prime example is the purging of San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, a former judge and political independent best known for spearheading the successful bribery prosecution of Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Her dismissal came in the midst of a large-scale investigation that so far has uncovered a scandal-tainted trail from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon and Congress, and possibly to the White House.
Just two days before Lam left the job, former CIA Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo was indicted by a San Diego grand jury on 11 counts of corruption for his illegal award of covert CIA contracts to long-time friend Brent R. Wilkes. Wilkes, in turn, faces an additional 25-count indictment by the San Diego grand jury for bribing Cunningham with $700,000 to secure Defense Department contracts from 1995 to 2004. Wilkes was a Republican party "Pioneer" who raised more than $100,000 for Bush's 2004 reelection.
Lam wasn't the only independent-minded prosecutor who apparently got too close for comfort for this administration. According to news reports, Nevada's U.S. Attorney, Daniel Bogden, was in the midst of overseeing an FBI investigation into the alleged bribing of Nevada's governor, Jim Gibbons, by a military contractor while Gibbons was in Congress. Another dismissed U.S. Attorney, Paul Charlton of Arizona, was investigating a current Republican member of Congress.
Predictably, the response of the Justice Department has been to deny and conceal. At first, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty informed the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is looking into the firings, that six of the eight U.S. attorneys were canned for "unspecified performance reasons." Yet now it has been disclosed that all but one of those U.S. attorneys had positive job evaluations. Carol Lam, for example, was praised by the head of the local FBI field office, who said that her firing appeared to be politically motivated. Indeed, several prosecutors in Lam's office and many defense lawyers expressed shock about her dismissal. A former U.S. attorney in San Diego, Peter Nunez, said that he had not seen anything like it in 35 years.
President Bush's purge of Ms. Lam and others who honored their posts by pursuing political corruption sends a chilling message to all U.S. attorneys. When the Senate Judiciary Committee reported out a bill on February 15th to restore checks and balances by restoring previous restrictions on the ability of the president to appoint U.S. attorneys, the Republican leadership prevented it from reaching the Senate floor at Bush's urging. This outrageous display of political muscle shows that the president's real priority is protecting corrupt partisans. It's time to block his dangerously partisan cudgel and restore what the Constitution demands—a legitimate check on presidential power.
Linda Andros is a legislative counsel for Public Citizen's Congress Watch.
© 2007 TomPaine.com
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