U.S. Attorney Scandal—Pittsburgh

By Scott Horton

Calls for the resignation or criminal investigation of U.S. attorneys around the country are proliferating, with Kansas City, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh being particular points of concern. This op-ed by a former assistant U.S. attorney published in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette makes the now familiar points:

The Bush administration has politicized the Department of Justice, just as it has every federal agency. The solicitor general used to be known as "the 10th justice" for his presumed fairness and independence in presenting arguments to the Supreme Court; the current solicitor general is just a mouthpiece for the administration's far-right ideology. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his subordinates have disgraced their offices with the positions they've taken to justify torture and the administration's evasion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's restrictions, loose as they are, on wiretaps.

Ms. Buchanan has been a devotee of the administration's policies. She has aided the effort to inflate the law-enforcement successes in the war on terror by misclassifying routine immigration and false-document cases as "anti-terrorism cases." For a time, the Western Pennsylvania District topped the nation in the number of "anti-terrorism" prosecutions, largely because dozens of Iraqi immigrant truck-drivers were prosecuted for paying off a motor-vehicles official to obtain commercial-drivers licenses. All of them did it to get work; none had terroristic intentions; all received sentences of probation

The closer the look we get of Ms. Buchanan the more outlandish and disgraceful her conduct appears. At this point newspapers around the country should be reviewing the conduct of their U.S. attorneys to see if their conduct matches the Buchanan pattern. We’re probably going to find a great deal more misconduct before this is over.