In Private Meeting with Gonzales, U.S. Attorneys Vent Concerns

By Scott Horton

The Washington Post reports this morning on a private meeting that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales conducted on Wednesday with U.S. attorneys from around the country in San Antonio.

More than a dozen U.S. attorneys spoke during the morning session, most of them expressing concern to Gonzales about the scandal’s impact on their own offices and the overall image of the department, several participants said.

“People were very plainspoken,” said one U.S. attorney, who along with others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was private. “The overwhelming majority of the comments were about the controversy and how people are still not happy in the way things were going…”

“There is no secret that a lot of us are still pretty upset by this, and at the impact it’s having on an institution we love,” one U.S. attorney said. “At the same time, there is a desire to get on with our work.”

Let’s see: You’re a prosecutor and your boss has perjured himself repeatedly in sworn testimony before Congress, withheld evidence and taken other extreme steps to obstruct an investigation into potentially criminal conduct. He blocks most lines of inquiry with convenient memory lapses about events and documents–and it is later revealed that he reviewed those documents just before going in to testify. The Associated Press then reports that many of the documents that Gonzales insists on withholding will establish that he lied about the scope of the U.S. attorneys purge and the involvement of the White House in the purge. Is there any reason to be concerned about that?

It would depend on whether your interest is in law enforcement or political pranks in the guise of law enforcement. The U.S. attorneys who are not in a state of rage against Gonzales are the ones to be worried about.