Reply #171: WA POST: BURDEN OF PROOF - It's Up to Gonzales Now

[L. Coyote]

BURDEN OF PROOF - It's Up to Gonzales Now
By Scott Turow
Sunday, April 15, 2007; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/13/AR2007041302091.html


Is political loyalty more important to the Bush Justice Department than prosecutorial independence?

To those of us who have been federal prosecutors, that's the critical question facing Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales as he testifies before Congress this week on the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. We know what's at stake: a balance of power between the Justice Department and those who handle day-to-day prosecutions that is the bedrock of federal law enforcement.

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.... a tradition of political independence in the day-to-day conduct of the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago, a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may attitude in the pursuit of evidence and investigations that persists under current U.S. attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who, like Skinner and Sullivan, has indicted and investigated both Republicans and Democrats.

Has that tradition been violated? In defending the administration in the current firing scandal, its supporters have relied on the established law that allows the president to place loyalists in policymaking positions in the Justice Department and in U.S. attorney's offices nationwide, where they can attend to the department's priorities. But that principle is only half of the legal yin and yang that governs the conduct of U.S. attorneys.

The U.S. attorney, in all 93 federal districts, has been a figure of unique autonomy, whose right to pursue individual cases as she or he sees fit, within the broad framework of Washington's policy directives, has been largely unquestioned for generations and is rooted in the office's local responsibilities.

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... the firings surely represent a newly intrusive attitude in which the administration seems convinced of its right to demand true-believer adherence to policy, as opposed to granting U.S. attorneys their traditional discretion to handle individual cases with an eye to all the attendant facts and circumstances.

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