Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

March 14, 2007

Gonzalez Flap: Double-Dealing Dems

UPDATE BELOW

If you haven't been questioning the Dems' attack on Alberto Gonzalez firing eight US attorneys yet, it's time to get your head out from under that rock. One of the most obvious "crock alert" soundings is that Janet Reno, of the Clinton administration, fired all 93 US attorneys in a "joint decision" with the White House. All 93? That's a whole lot of pink slips. If nothing else, environmentalists should have jumped on them for wasting paper on all the paperwork involved with such a huge sweep.

Then, there's the possibility that ongoing investigations will put Dems in a bad light (h/t Kitty).

But the clincher that screams "political expediency" is this: Hillary Clinton's campaign is sending out an e-mail asking supporters to "join" her in asking Gonzalez to resign. (Thanks to The Man for passing it on. If anyone else would like to see it, I'd be happy to forward it.) This passage jumped out at me:

Why should Gonzales resign? Because he is at the center of a widening scandal over the firing of several U.S. attorneys -- firings we now know to be political. These attacks on the impartiality of the federal government's prosecutors are a genuine threat to the foundations of our justice system.

It's so bad that one U.S. attorney in Arkansas was fired to make room for a former aide to Karl Rove.

One US attorney was fired to make room for a Rove crony? Does Hillary conveniently forget that the entire staff of the White House Travel Office was fired to make room for her political cronies Darnell Martens and Harry Thomason? Claiming that there was "misconduct" in the Travel Office, seven longtime employees were hustled out, forced to leave the White House grounds on the floor in the back of a van. The FBI was called in, and reputations were viciously and callously smeared in the quest to make the ouster look legitimate. (Billy Dale, the Travel Office head, was eventually tried for fraud but the jury acquitted him.) For a Travelgate refresher, click here.

Clinton supporters contend that the firings of the 93 US attorneys and the seven Travel Office employees were the right of the Clinton administration because anyone appointed to such positions serves at the pleasure of the president. This is true. It is also true that the eight US attorneys fired by Gonzalez served at the pleasure of the current president.

That the Democrats choose to start this obvious battle is very telling indeed.

*Gayle gives us her two cents.

UPDATE: Reverse_Vampyr lays it out for us:

News flash: the US attorney are "at will" employees who operate at the pleasure of the President. If they're not enacting administration policy, he is completely within the President's Constitutional powers to remove them. The Bush administration is doing the same thing the Clinton administration did, arguably however, in not such partisan fashion. But even if that were so, this so-called scandal is nothing more than more Democrat hypocrisy. And Hillary's demagoguing with the phrase "the politicization of our prosecutorial system" is about as pot-meet-kettle as it gets.