Posted on 03/29/2007 5:43:05 PM PDT by Kitten Festival
Politics: The long-awaited "whistle-blower" in the U.S. attorneys affair gave Senate Democrats an unpleasant surprise: The whole issue of political influence in choosing prosecutors is "largely artificial," he testified.
Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and coordinator of the December removal of eight U.S. attorneys, was supposed to be the John Dean of the Attorneygate scandal. Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont, New York Sen. Charles Schumer and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the panel's ranking Republican, all did their best impersonations of former GOP Sen. Howard Baker at the Watergate hearings, solemnly asking Sampson the equivalent of:
"What did the attorney general know and when did he know it?"
But while Sampson's attorney whet their appetites in the days before the hearing by suggesting his testimony would contradict Gonzales on the AG's involvement in the firings, Sampson's voluntarily appearance challenged the very basis of their probe.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Was it not Bill Clinton who dismissed all but one U.S. Attorney as nearly his first act of office? Remember the huge media outcry? Me neither.
As usual, IBD is on the mark. But the press has, in fact, made hay today out of the fact that Gonzalez's former chief of staff has called the firings political and has said that Gonzalez was involved in them.
Of course he was. You don't fire US Attorney's without the boss's approval. But the press is still making a big thing of it.
As Chris Wallace said to DiFi (recently deposed from her seat on the Military Construction Subcommittee for unethical conflicts), "There's no there there." She tried to claim that they were fired for "political reasons," and both Wallace and the Trent Lott said of course they were and that it was perfectly legal, and she had to agree. The dems wasted a lot of oxygen in this snipe hunt. (Rush has that tidbit on his website from, I think, Wednesday of this week.)
Was it not Bill Clinton who dismissed all but one U.S. Attorney as nearly his first act of office? Remember the huge media outcry? Me neither.
I'm getting kind of tired of hearing this one - all recent presidents, including President Reagan dismissed all or nearly all of the US attorneys from the previous administration (when the previous administration was the other party). All put in their own people. The thing that caught the MSM attention here was dismissing people appointed by this administration. It's unusual. Not wrong, but unusual.
"Of course he was. You don't fire US Attorney's without the boss's approval. But the press is still making a big thing of it."
Gonzales' major problem is that he stated,
"But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That's basically what I knew as the Attorney General."
and
"QUESTION: How could your chief of staff be working closely with the President on which U.S. attorneys to be let go and you not know the specifics?
ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: Well, again, as -- I accept responsibility for everything that happens here within this department. But when you have 110,000 people working in the department obviously there are going to be decisions that I'm not aware of in real time. Many decisions are delegated. We have people who were confirmed by the Senate who, by statute, have been delegated authority to make decisions."
He had full discretion to fire these people which is why it is so strange that he didn't just come out and say so. H
Everything that I've seen of Gonzalez suggests that he just isn't up to the job. He's way over his head. His only qualification appears to have been that he is a personal friend of Bush.
Thank God he wasn't nominated for SCOTUS, which was a real threat there for a while.
I just wish we could get some real converative appointments rather than friends of the family so to speak. Could you imagine Harriet Miers on the supreme court?
I fought it tooth and nail. I did quite a lot of research here in the forum, looking up what she had actually written, speeches she had given, and so forth. Some of it was not pretty. Lots of affirmative action, lots of feminism, and apparently supportive of "a woman's right to choose." Also more signs of her ability to get along with movers and shakers than of any kind of philosophical or legal acumen. Her writings are filled with bad cliches.
She was a big-time operator in the corporate law business, and she served her clients well. She appears to have served Bush well in her role of organizing searches for qualified people. But she would have been a perfectly awful SCOTUS appointment if she had been given a lifetime appointment to make bad decisions.
United States Attorneys, USDoJ
Cornell Law School CHAPTER 35—UNITED STATES ATTORNEYS
The libs are also claiming that they "restored" the 1986 law. Nope. They struck it and rewrote it. The 1986 law is posted above. This is the rewrite.
The supposed "smoking gun" that Sampson (what a name for such a wimp!) was supposed to reveal turned out to be an empty water pistol. Not that kept the RATS and the MSM from lying about it all day long.
Not quite right, according to what I've read.
No president prior to Clinton ever dismissed all U.S. attorneys in one swell foop. (And, as boris noted, it was one of Clinton's first official acts.)
Instead, previous incoming administrations replaced U.S. attorneys slowly, for the most part, usually allowing some to stay on to complete pending investigations, or until their terms were nearly finished.
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