Iglesiasgate: Resign Alberto, Resign Karl

It's time for the Attorney General to go, says the New York Times:

(Gonzales) has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.

First, there was Mr. Gonzales’s lame op-ed article in USA Today trying to defend the obviously politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, which he dismissed as an “overblown personnel matter.” Then his inspector general exposed the way the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been abusing yet another unnecessary new power that Mr. Gonzales helped wring out of the Republican-dominated Congress in the name of fighting terrorism.

Mr. Gonzales does not directly run the F.B.I., but it is part of his department and has clearly gotten the message that promises (and civil rights) are meant to be broken [...]

We opposed Mr. Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general. His résumé was weak, centered around producing legal briefs for Mr. Bush that assured him that the law said what he wanted it to say. More than anyone in the administration, except perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gonzales symbolizes Mr. Bush’s disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.

Chuck Schumer joined the chorus on Face the Nation this morning. He made the point that the Bush Administration hasn't figured out that the Attorney General position is not a partisan slot where its leader defends the President and uses his law enforcement powers to punish the President's enemies. The Attorney General is supposed to answer to the rule of law and the Constitution. Gonzales continues to act like he's the President's lawyer.

If you step back and see what the Justice Department has done here, it's insidious. They clearly directed all of their US Attorneys to go after Democrats and take it easy on Republicans, which the majority of them did, reflected in the 4-fold difference between investigations of Democrats more than Republicans at the local level. The few prosecutors who wouldn't go along with the plan were fired, and a batch of transparently fellacious excuses were made to justfy the sackings.

Now let's cut to the chase, the big story at the heart of all of this: San Diego and the firing of Carol Lam.

Given what we know about New Mexico and Washington state, it simply defies credulity to believe that Lam -- in the midst of an historic corruption investigation touching the CIA, the White House and major Republican appropriators on Capitol Hill -- got canned because she wasn't prosecuting enough immigration cases. Was it the cover? Sure. The reason? Please.

I'm not sure Lam would have been canned simply for prosecuting Cunningham. His corruption was so wild and cartoonish that even a crew with as little respect for the rule of law would have realized the impossibility of not prosecuting him. But she didn't stop there. She took her investigation deep into congressional appropriations process -- kicking off a continuing probe into the dealings of former Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis. She also followed the trail into the heart of the Bush CIA. Those two stories are like mats of loose threads. That's where the story lies.

(The appropriations process is at the heart of how the GOP rewards its wealthy corporatist friends. That can never be touched, as it would constitute meddling with the forces of nature. Everybody would go down.)

The Justice Department then told the prosecutors not to go public with their concerns about being fired, or they would risk the Attorney General coming forward with demeaning their performance.

And in perhaps the worst aspect of this, they cooperated directly with the White House political director to do this, and as such they put politics above the Constitution.

The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints about federal prosecutors as House investigators declared their intention to question him about any role he may have played in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It's a little bizarre, seeing these Republicans trying to justify firing prosecutors for political purposes by saying that they were simply firing prosecutors for political purposes. It's one of those head-shakers.

I think Gonzales may actually go for this one, though there's no way Rove does (while it was seemingly his idea, he's pretty darn good at covering tracks). But obviously they should both step down. They have disgraced their offices by codifying lawlessness into the top law enforcement position in the nation.