Karl Rove's Danse macabre

By Scott Horton

Over at The Nation's Tomdispatch blog, former career federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega looks at the latest developments in the U.S. attorney purge and assesses the situation . . .

It is these activities that, to adopt the words of a fellow former Assistant United States Attorney and lifelong Republican, "turn my stomach." Given that, under the stewardship of John Ashcroft and then Alberto Gonzales, the Department of Justice has consistently engaged in heinous criminal activity and blatant civil-rights violations around the world, I was finding it difficult to be as exercised as some about the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. Certainly, there is abundant evidence that as many as seven U.S. Attorneys were removed for no other reason than to enable the administration to fill their positions with up-and-coming Republicans or, worse, to interfere with or influence the investigation of one or more cases for partisan political reasons—a purpose that even Sampson acknowledged would be improper. But that didn't get to me. Nor was I particularly incensed by the fact that, as former U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins of Little Rock, Arkansas commented on CBS's Face the Nation, the authority to make presidential appointments may possibly have been "delegated down through Harriet Miers, Karl Rove, Judge Gonzales and all the way down to a bunch of 35-year-old-kids who—who got in a room together and tried to decide who was the most loyal to the president." That story seemed to me to be less an accurate description of what happened than a blame-it-on-the-kids alibi offered on behalf of Bush, Rove, Miers, and Gonzales . . .

But of course, the blame-it-on-the-kids approach doesn't really work because there is now more than adequate evidence that the kids were doing exactly what their supervisors all the way up the line wanted: eliminate career professionals who were performing at a consistently high level and replace them with political hacks who could be counted upon to exercise prosecutorial discretion to achieve partisan political objectives. This is a very severe subversion of the machinery of justice which has tainted the entire Justice Department—an organization which is still populated by many high-minded, dedicated civil servants who don't deserve the taint.