Editorial: Undermining public confidence

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 | 7:25 a.m.

As the congressional investigation into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year unfolds, it is clear that the Justice Department under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been corrupted by politics.

The Bush administration, which has denied that politics was the reason for the firings, has no credibility left on this issue.

On Monday The Washington Post reported that in preparing to fire attorneys to make way for more political appointees, Justice Department officials sent the White House a ranking of U.S. attorneys in March 2005. That list ranked Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney in Illinois, among attorneys who had "not distinguished themselves."

Former U.S. Attorney for Manhattan Mary Jo White, who was Fitzgerald's supervisor when he was in New York, rightly told the Post that the list "lacks total credibility."

"He is probably the best prosecutor in the nation - certainly one of them," White said.

Of course, the Justice Department's ranking wasn't about performance, it was about politics. At the time, Fitzgerald was leading the investigation in the Valerie Plame-CIA leak case, which badly damaged the White House. Earlier this year Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was convicted on perjury charges stemming from the case.

While Fitzgerald kept his job, Daniel Bogden, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, who was ranked the same as Fitzgerald, lost his job. Bogden was fired in December, allegedly for performance issues, but in an e-mail written on Dec. 5, two days before Bogden was fired, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty said he was "skittish" about firing him.

"I'll admit," McNulty wrote, "(I) have not looked at his district's performance."

So McNulty was on the verge of firing a veteran prosecutor even though he hadn't carefully weighed his performance? Talk about incompetence.

Now, adding to the embarrassment, Justice Department officials are talking about rehiring Bogden.

In past administrations the Justice Department understood that there is supposed to be a separation between prosecutors and politics.

After receiving complaints about immigration prosecutions from Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in October 2005, then Assistant Attorney General William Moschella did write a letter that mildly rebuked Issa, saying prosecutors needed to be independent from "congressional challenge and scrutiny."

Violating that independence, he wrote, "would undermine public and judicial confidence in our law enforcement processes."

Ironically, it is now the Bush administration undermining the public's confidence by the deceitful way it has handled this whole situation. If President Bush wants to restore public confidence, he should fire Gonzales and those who created this plot, order his staff to answer all of Congress' questions and make the truth known.