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But George W. Bush's White House was well on its way to punishing its political enemies by subverting the American legal system.
This is an inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the 392-page Justice Department report issued last week on the firings of nine U.S. attorneys in late 2006.
Here's another: Our legal system doesn't always "work" and may not be working right now. It is so fragile - breakable, even - that public officials can stonewall legitimate investigations and pretty much get away with it. At least so far.
Last week's report by the Justice Department's inspector general found that, of the nine firings, at least three were not based on "poor performance," as former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had claimed. Instead, partisan political considerations were at work.
The most egregious example: the firing in New Mexico of U.S. Attorney David Yglesias for not pursuing a prosecution for voter fraud in the days before the November 2006 election, thereby depriving congressional candidate Heather Wilson of a powerful "wedge" issue against her Democratic opponent.
Despite strong denials, the report confirmed that the impetus for the firings came from the White House, specifically from political guru Karl Rove and White House counsel Harriet Miers.
The fact that three of the nine firings covered by the report were politically motivated doesn't mean the other six were legitimate, either. The report is nowhere near complete, because Rove and Miers refused to submit to interviews or provide all the documents that were requested.
Current Attorney General Michael Mukasey has appointed a special prosecutor, Nora Dennehy, to continue the investigation, armed with subpeona power. This came as a bit of a surprise, since Mukasey declined to prosecute Justice Department employees who were found - in a separate report issued last August - to have injected Republican politics into the hiring of supposedly nonpartisan rank-and-file lawyers. Even though the officials had violated the law, Mukasey said the "negative publicity" was punishment enough.
It's unclear, though, whether the special prosecutor will have the independence to actually do her job. She doesn't have to file a public report - and when members of Congress asked Inspector General Glenn Fine if the prosecutor, as an employee of the Justice Department, could be overruled by the attorney general, he hedged. "I'll leave that for another day," he said. No word on when that day will come.
It's true that U.S. attorneys are political appointees who can be fired without "cause," but the cases strongly suggest the attorneys were axed because they prosecuted Republicans or failed to prosecute Democrats. And what about the U.S. attorneys who got to keep their jobs? Did they bring prosecutions for political reasons?
This question looms large in the astonishing case of Don Siegelman, the former Democratic governor of Alabama who was prosecuted, convicted - and jailed - on federal corruption charges in a case brought by a U.S. attorney who is married to an ally of Karl Rove. After nine months in prison, a federal court released Siegelman pending appeal, because it found "substantial questions" about the fairness of the conviction.
The question of politicization of the Justice Department will not be resolved in the remaining months of the Bush administration, but the next president must not let the matter drop. Unequal justice - especially if it's infected with partisan politics - is no justice at all. *
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