Political Profiling: The Smoking Gun

By Scott Horton

While there are a great number of serious charges now being leveled at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, the most serious by far is the suggestion that, in coordination with Karl Rove, he has perverted the prosecutorial service for purposes of partisan political objectives, namely the persecution of Democrats and the suppression of voters suspected of having Democratic Party sympathies. Indeed, this charge seems to link much of the interaction between the White House and the upper echelon of the Department of Justice (including, for instance, Attorney General Gonzales, his two senior-most deputies, Paul J. McNulty and William E. Moschella, and key political functionaries such as Kyle Sampson and his fifth amendment-invoking colleague Monica Goodling). The volume of anecdotal evidence supporting the charge has mushroomed since the decision on December 7, 2006 to remove eight U.S. attorneys located in “battleground states” preselected by Rove, and replace them with new, more politically pliant creatures – skirting the process of Senatorial review as a result of some legerdemain played in the last days of the outgoing Congress.

But there is far more formal empirical evidence that makes clear that the cashiering of the U.S. attorneys and the pressure to crank up a voter suppression program are not aberrations, but rather elements of a multi-pronged and centrally coordinated political corruption of the machinery of justice. This evidence is in fact something of a smoking gun, which has gathered remarkably little attention in the Imus-obsessed press.

Donald Shields and John Cragan are professors at the University of Minnesota who undertook a study to ascertain whether the Bush Administration was engaged in criminal prosecutions that targeted Democrats because they are Democrats—in other words, political profiling. Their results are stunning and have not been effectively controverted.

Data indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops. The current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling.

To ask an obvious question: what are the objectives of this “political profiling”? The answer is simple: it is to undermine the Democratic Party and secure for the Republican Party an unfair advantage in the electoral process. The Shields-Cragan paper identifies five major points in this regard:

1. Political profiling makes Democratic officials look like they are more corrupt than Republicans. Available data make clear that corruption of a normal adjunct of political power, and there is no data to suggest that Republicans are more corrupt than Democrats or vice versa – although such contentions would figure as an element of the political propaganda of either party.

2. Political profiling of local Democratic elected officials attacks the party at the very grassroots essence of its personality. Each local case of reported or insinuated corruption by the federal authorities eats at and saps the local Democrat's energy to be the grassroots leader of the party and drains his or her resources in defense against the comparative unlimited resources of the federal government.

3. Political profiling discredits each candidate's persona as a viable leader of and spokesperson for the local Democratic party.

4. Political profiling weakens the candidate's ability to raise monies for themselves when seeking re-election and negates their ability to raise money for other Democratic candidates.

5. By keeping political profiling at the local level it passes under the radar screen of the news media and is not reported or viewed as the coordinated nationwide program that it in fact is - it harder for reporters to connect the dots between corruption investigations in say Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, or Philadelphia let alone towns like Carson, Colton, East Point, or Escambia, or counties like Cherokee, Harrison, Hudson, or Lake. Each local report of a corruption investigation appears as only an isolated incident rather than as a central example of a broader pattern created by the Bush Justice Department's unethical practice of political profiling.

With the Shields-Cragan study in hand, newspapers around the country are looking at the conduct of their local U.S. attorneys and are turning up stories which corroborate the Shields-Cragan thesis. If fully sustained, this will be an indictment not merely of the leadership of the Department. It will also raise fair questions about the professionalism, independence and integrity of federal prosecutors in the field around the country who allowed themselves to be the tools of this program.

Now it remains for Congress to shut this corrupt operation down, fully investigate the matter and hold the perpetrators to account, potentially through the criminal justice process.