Privacy Digest

The U.S. attorney purge and Watergate:

During Watergate, one would sometimes hear a certain volume of complaint: Sure, there was a petty burglary at the Democratic headquarters — but why was that such a big deal? Didn't the government have more important things to worry about? Didn't we know there was a war on?

Of course, as eventually became clear, the little breakin at the Watergate Hotel was the tip of an iceberg of corruption and fraud. And that lawbreaking wasn't random or motiveless; it was centered on the aggressive rigging of a national presidential election. Watergate's collective menagerie of petty evils insured that Nixon would be re-elected. That was the grand crime: subversion of the democratic process.

As the implosion of the Gonzales Justice Department continues, it's important to keep that history in mind. Right now we're still hearing the protests: This was just about firing a few political appointees! They weren't following the White House's wishes! Bush wanted them to root out election fraud, and they weren't getting with the program! Why are we troubling ourselves over this stuff? Don't we know there's a war on?

In the U.S. attorney purge scandal as with Watergate, the "it's just not a big deal" defense is collapsing — only faster this time. To understand why you only need a handful of facts.

Every president appoints U.S. attorneys, and some (like Clinton) have fired the previous administration's appointees en masse and replaced them. But the selective firing of a large group in the middle of a president's term is unprecedented, sowing doubt about motives. And the Justice Department's Keystone-Kops-like effort to justify the dismissals, using multiple contradictory reasons, has only fed suspicions.

U.S. attorneys are prosecutors who have enormous latitude and power to go after potential wrongdoing. They operate under the Justice Department's direction but they have a tradition of independence, and both parties agree that they should be insulated from political pressure. They are political appointees — not political operatives.

The evidence continues to mount that the purged attorneys — loyal Republicans and Bush appointees all — were fired because (a) they weren't aggressively pursuing an agenda of "cracking down on election fraud" that was a cornerstone of Karl Rove's long-term strategy and (b) Rove wanted to ease them out so some of his young-turk up-and-comers could pad their resumes before the Bush administration sinks into its terminal mire.

At this point it sounds like we're just dealing with some ugly political hardball. But as Josh Marshall (whose site has been a font of reporting and insight on this story from the beginning) has argued, the whole "election fraud" dimension has fouler partisan implications.

"Cracking down on electoral fraud" is a GOP code phrase; in practice, it means finding ways to keep poor and minority voters away from the polls. Two lengthy New York Times pieces — yesterday's and today's — have chronicled how little fire there is behind the GOP "election fraud" smoke. Gonzales and Rove kept pushing their U.S. attorneys to trump up election fraud cases, even as impartial or bipartisan investigations poking into these charges kept coming up empty.

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