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Gonzales should go

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has shown himself to be either dishonest or incompetent - or maybe both. The scandals within the Justice Department keep piling up, yet Gonzales doesn't seem to appreciate the gravity of the offenses. "I acknowledge that mistakes were made here," was the upshot of Gonzales' lame mea culpa for the politically motivated firing of at least seven U.S. attorneys, a controversy he first dismissed as "an overblown personnel matter." He pleaded ignorance of the machinations between his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, who has since resigned, and the White House.

During nearly two years of e-mail communications between Sampson and then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, whom President Bush once nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, a list of prosecutors was targeted for a political firing squad. Sampson wrote that only those U.S. attorneys who "produced, managed well, and exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general" should be retained, although even two of those would ultimately be removed. Prosecutors who angered powerful Republicans or focused too closely on wrongdoing by Republican insiders were at the top of the hit list.

Sampson also wrote e-mails plotting how to keep an interim appointee in place for as long as possible, even if he was unpalatable to the Senate. "Forestall" and "run out the clock," Sampson suggested.

For Gonzales to be completely unaware of this back and forth would mean he is out of touch with what is going on at the highest levels of the department. Either that or he is not being forthcoming.

There is little reason for anyone on Capitol Hill to trust his assurances. His credibility is shot. Gonzales told lawmakers concerned that well-regarded prosecutors from their states were unfairly removed that he would "never, ever make a change in a U.S. attorney position for political reasons." Now we know that these prosecutors were the victims of a highly politicized process - a process that has the fingerprints of Karl Rove on it, although further congressional hearings are necessary to determine Rove's precise involvement.

The U.S. attorney scandal comes on the heels of a withering report by the inspector general of the Justice Department that implicates the department in abusing the powers it has been given under the USA Patriot Act. The audit involved the FBI's use of national security letters - administrative subpoenas used to obtain personal records without first going before a court. The use of these letters has exploded in recent years. In 2005, the FBI issued more than 19,000 of them.

The inspector general found that in nearly a quarter of the sample examined there were potential violations of the law, meaning that someone's privacy and civil liberties were compromised. The report also found that Congress was getting faulty information on the use of national security letters, making responsive oversight impossible.

This is in addition to an earlier inspector general's report that documented widespread inaccuracies by the Justice Department in its reporting of terrorism prosecution statistics. Cases of everyday crimes were being labeled as terror convictions. The report suggested that the cause was shoddy record-keeping, but these mistakes conveniently helped to bolster the department's terror-fighting claims.

Gonzales is running a department that seems to have trouble working within the statutory limits of its power - even as its power has been markedly expanded since 9/11. Even congressional Republicans are distancing themselves from Gonzales, who has gone far riding President Bush's political coattails. Instead of taking his attorney general to the political woodshed, the president should ask for his resignation as the first step in eliminating the political stench inside the Justice Department.

[Last modified March 16, 2007, 01:11:23]