Let’s all acknowledge that the organized political left is way
out of line in suggesting that the latest Republican “scandal” has
criminal ramifications — and move on. The reality is that the left
is taking advantage not of formal malfeasance but of sheer
incompetence and political tone-deafness on the right. (For
original reporting on one case study of that tone-deafness, see the
final section of this column.) Therefore:
The time has come for President George W. Bush to significantly
shake up the Department of Justice (DoJ) and perhaps parts of the
White House counsel’s office as well. It’s also time for the
administration to (A) start defending Arkansas interim U.S.
Attorney Tim Griffin; (B) stop trashing the reputations of the U.S.
Attorneys it let go; (C) stop making just-resigned Justice
Department chief of staff Kyle Sampson serve as the fall guy for
his superiors; and (D) begin a concerted effort to better explain
and advocate its positions on law enforcement, judicial
appointments, and anti-terrorism initiatives.
The current controversy about the eight fired U.S. Attorneys
(USAs) is only the latest piece of evidence, albeit the biggest so
far, that the entire Bush legal team, both in the White House and
at Justice, needs selective but significant refashioning. It has
been slow to forward judicial nominees to the Senate and weak at
supporting them both in terms of Capitol Hill politicking and of
public communications. It has failed on a number of other fronts as
well (see Andy McCarthy here).
From a PR standpoint, it doesn’t help that where it does do a
good job (for instance, counterterrorism, presumably, judging from
the lack of successful terrorist attacks on our homeland since
9/11), its triumphs are of necessity in the shadows.
But the topic du jour is the ham-handed management of
the U.S. Attorneys. The administration has somehow allowed eight
separate stories, some of them more defensible than others, to be
wrapped into one big, bad story. Its treatment of the fired USAs
was execrable. It’s not that it had no legal right to fire
them all, or no practical, legitimately policy-driven reason to
replace some of them. The problem is that it pushed out all of them
not with a pat on the back but with a kick in the head.
Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty infamously justified the
firings by citing supposed deficiencies in performance. Whether or
not that was true in all the cases, it ensured that these loyal
soldiers who had mostly gone quietly instead got riled up to defend
their own reputations. That’s when all Hades really broke loose,
and served up a big target for the left to exploit.
McNulty’s public rebuke looked especially odd, for instance, in
the case of Kevin Ryan, the San Francisco USA who faithfully
executed administration policies right down the line while famously
prosecuting, with great success, the steroid case made famous by
the alleged involvement of baseball star Barry Bonds. The president
himself publicly complimented that prosecution, and earned
political points in so doing.
The now-public e-mail trail about the whole imbroglio shows that
as late as Sept. 13 of last year, Ryan did not appear on the list
of USAs who the administration “should consider pushing out.”
Surely McNulty or his top associate David Margolis should have made
sure that Ryan wasn’t so embarrassingly thrown under the bus.
In sworn testimony before congressional committees, both McNulty
and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales repeatedly misstated the
facts of the firings in these cases. When the errors came to light,
they threw chief of staff Kyle Sampson under the bus as well. But
it beggars belief that neither of them kept abreast with
Sampson’s work on personnel issues both so important and so
politically sensitive. Frankly, Sampson’s e-mail trail shows almost
nothing out of the ordinary. There is nothing inherently wrong with
a chief of staff considering the political ramifications of making
changes for politically appointed positions, when he has been
specifically tasked with making those changes. In most parts of the
e-trail, he comes off decently. Faced with a ludicrous request from
then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers to replace all 93 U.S.
Attorneys, Sampson showed the good sense to recommend a much more
targeted list.
Thinking he was doing the bidding of the top levels of the White
House — after all, the public perception was that Miers channeled
President Bush like a super-talented medium — Sampson diligently
went about the now-narrowed task he was assigned. Miers’ deputy
Bill Kelley, whose judgment has been questioned by conservatives
before, also was kept fully within the e-mail chain.
Unlike Gonzales and McNulty, both of whom are Senate-approved
policy appointees, Sampson was a staff guy. No matter how much he
was trusted, his final recommendations on such key appointments as
USAs would not have been approved without a careful sign-off from
his superiors — not in any system that makes any sense at all.
ALL OF THAT SAID, none of this bumbling and none of DoJ’s ill
treatment of the fired USAs would have lent itself to quite such a
level of bloodlust from the left if the firings couldn’t be somehow
laid at the feet of the left’s favorite uber-villain, Karl
Rove. In reality, though, Rove’s fingerprints are on only one of
the replacements, that of his onetime deputy Tim Griffin. And there
was no good reason for Rove to stay out of that appointment. Here
was a loyal, qualified, and extremely talented underling whose job
at the White House was filled because Griffin went off to serve his
country in the military. And word was that the USA in Griffin’s
home state of Arkansas, Bud Cummins, was already open to leaving
his post for more lucrative private employment after a grinding
four-year term.
Even here, though, DoJ couldn’t handle the replacement with
grace.
On Wednesday night, Cummins told me how he experienced the
developments. First, though, understand that Cummins is a
consummate gentleman and a Bush and Republican loyalist who served
as official Arkansas elector for Bush in 2000. He might have
expressed resentment of Griffin, on whose behalf Cummins was nudged
aside. Instead, here’s what he said of his onetime aide: “Tim did a
good job when he worked in the office. He worked hard. He took a
real leadership role. He did a good job as a prosecutor. I
certainly don’t take issue with any of Tim’s credentials for this
job…. I feel very comfortable saying that.” (For more on
Griffin’s superior qualifications, see the excellent accompanying
piece
on the Spectator website today by Kane Webb.)
While Cummins ended up not leaving the USA job of his
own volition, he said he had spoken a number of times to Griffin
about his intentions to do so, and probably mentioned it casually
to others at the Justice Department along the way. “There is no
question that my wife and I had talked it over….Right about a
third to a half of the U.S. Attorneys I had started with in 2001
had moved on….I had a willingness and intention to leave in the
time frame of early 2006, but my First Assistant became ill, and
subsequently died, and it just seemed a bad time to leave.”
Still, he was surprised when Justice officials called him and
told him he should step aside. He expected to leave under his own
terms. Nevertheless, “I worked hard to make it a smooth transition.
I went to pretty great pains to make it a situation that
represented what should have happened instead of what
actually happened. I mean, as far as I can tell, all of us [the
fired USAs] were going away like good soldiers. But this
wasan unprecedented move. I’m not aware of any president
before who removed his own appointees without malfeasance.”
But he and Griffin worked out a transition plan, and things
seemed basically okay — until Gonzales told Congress that all the
replacements were made because of issues of poor management or the
like. Suddenly, the good soldier found himself chafing as his own
performance was publicly questioned. When McNulty then repeated the
explanation in more explicit terms, while specifically exempting
Cummins from the criticism, Cummins was quoted in the press as
defending the reputation of the other fired USAs. He received a
phone call from McNulty’s chief of staff Michael Elston which,
according to Cummins, seemed like a thinly veiled threat to
escalate the public criticism of him and the other seven if they
didn’t stay quiet.
That was the last straw. Cummins testified before Congress to
that effect, and on Wednesday he told me he blamed “certainly the
attorney general [Gonzales] and the deputy attorney general
[McNulty] too. Paul McNulty, especially, as a former U.S. Attorney
himself, should have seen that the public explanation of the
firings were inadequate on their face, specious on their
face….It’s just wrong. These people are being disparaged
wrongfully.”
ALL OF WHICH SHOWS a severe lack of political tact by the Gonzales
team. There is nothing wrong with wanting new blood after four
years or six years. The president never spends a lot of time
explaining Cabinet replacements whenever he makes them. If handled
one by one instead of as an attention-getting group of eight
replacements in very short order, the changes would have attracted
little attention. As well they should have, because there is no
inherent scandal in such replacements.
Instead, the administration created its own quicksand and
stepped right into it.
It did so even in the case of the loyal Cummins, who showed
every intention of going quietly into the night. The press and the
cut-throat left, predictably, homed in on the utterly innocent
appointment of Griffin and used it to wrongly infer that Rove’s
supposedly evil hand was responsible for all eight firings, and to
further infer (or in some cases say outright) that by very virtue
of his association with Rove, Griffin was no more than a political
hack. The truth, of course, is the opposite (again, see Kane Webb’s
article): that Griffin was a Rove favorite because Griffin was so
talented.
All of which means that what should have been a simple set of
administrative changes — some perhaps wise, some almost certainly
not, but none of them nefarious — instead is dominating headlines
and treated as a scandal. That is not the legacy of a tremendously
competent attorney general.
Meanwhile, Griffin is keeping his head low. Reached by phone
yesterday morning, he would say next to nothing. Finally he offered
this, almost wistfully: “I was honored to be offered the post and I
was honored to accept. Despite all the criticism, I just want to
stay focused and try to do the best job I can.”
That’s what Cummins was doing, too, and what Kevin Ryan in San
Francisco was trying to do, and what Kyle Sampson was in his own
way trying to do. Now they all are victims of a “scandal” that
should not have snared them.
