Rove's Man in Little Rock?

Posted by Andrew Zajac at 6:15 a.m. CST

The feud between the Senate and the Bush Administration over how U.S.
Attorneys are appointed keeps festering, thanks in part to the long shadow
of White House advisor Karl Rove.

At issue is a little-noticed section of the USA Patriot Act which gave
the Attorney General the power to appoint U.S. Attorneys without Senate
confirmation.

Previously, the AG could appoint an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days.
If an USA wasn't confirmed by the Senate within that time, a federal
judge in the affected district could make an interim appointment who
served until the Senate approved a presidential nominee for the post.

As the stints of political appointees go, U.S. attorneys are relatively
long-lived. Many of them serve through the end of a presidential
administration, and/or until there's a change of party in the White
House. So there was little reason to believe this bit of Patriot Act
arcana would matter to anyone.

Until the end of the 2006, when telephones rang nearly simultaneously in
the offices of several U.S. attorneys. In each instance, on the other
end of the line was a honcho from the Justice Department announcing that
it was time for a new prosecutor.

At least seven U.S. attorneys have been asked to resign without cause,
according to lawmakers.

This might have been a merely curious development, but it became politically
provocative and intolerable when it was discovered that one of the
dismissed prosecutors, H. E. Cummins III, in Arkansas, was being replaced
by J. Timothy Griffin, who is a former military and civilian prosecutor,
as well as a former deputy to Rove.

Griffin is not bashful about displaying his credentials, political
as well as professional.

Another prosecutor shown the door was
Carol Lam, who had been overseeing the devastating and
still-percolating Duke Cunningham congressional bribery investigation in
southern California.

And now, it turns out that a prosecutor dismissed in Nevada, Daniel Bogden,
would be overseeing an investigation into whether the state's Republican
governor, Jim Gibbons, accepted unreported gifts from a contractor while
Gibbons served in Congress.

Asked specifically about the situation in Arkansas, Deputy Attorney General
Paul McNulty last week told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Cummins
hadn't done anything wrong, but that the Justice Department just wanted to give Griffin
a turn.

It's expected to be a brief turn. Arkansas Democratic Sen. David Pryor told
the committee that he couldn't support Griffin and, with the political stink
building, DOJ on Friday announced that Griffin will not be nominated
for the permanent appointment.

McNulty insisted that the department was within its rights to replace
prosecutors as it saw fit, but he promised that the Attorney General's
new appointing power wouldn't be used to end-run Senate confirmation.

Let's just say that several committee members found McNulty's
reassurance, well, not reassuring.

Republicans seemed to be agreeing with Democrats that there needed to be
a fix to prevent the executive branch from circumventing Senate
confirmation. Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein, of California, had a bill
that restored a 120-day limit on the Attorney General's appointment and
the problem seemed on its way to being solved after being voted out of
the committee by a 13-6 margin.

But now Republicans want changes, maybe lengthening that 120-day limit,
maybe setting standards on who judges could appoint, maybe getting what
the administration wants another way...

Apart from any immediate desire to swap in new prosecutors for its own
political or performance-related reasons, the Bush Administration
objects to allowing judges to appoint prosecutors as a separation of
powers violation, and as an invitation to cronyism and conflict of interest.

Students of the administration probably hear a familiar riff in all of
this.

From its first days, months before 9/11, when the nation gave the
president an almost completely free hand, the Bush White House has had an
expansive view of the powers of the executive. Stripping federal judges
of the power to appoint even interim prosecutors is perfectly in keeping
with that view.