Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor, a regular contributor to Tomdispatch as well as the author of "United States v. George W. Bush et al.," warns us about the Problem with Alberto. Namely that he is only part of the problem. The Bush Administration will still be running the Justice Department.
Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch had apparently been clued in on the talking points. From time to time, he would lob questions to the attorney general along the lines of "Do the US attorneys actually handle the public corruption cases themselves?" The well-coached and grateful Gonzales would then explain that, no, the work in the US attorneys' offices is done by the career prosecutors, who will keep doing their cases no matter who the US attorney is. Indeed, Gonzales offered plaintively, the Office of the Attorney General didn't really even know "that much" about what was going on in the US attorneys' offices.
Really? Elizabeth de la Vega has a different view:
As one who worked as an assistant US attorney from 1983 through 2004 - in two districts, under four presidents and roughly ten different US attorneys - I can say that virtually every clause, and certainly the overall implication, of Gonzales's claim is false.
She goes on...
It is not true, for starters, that the AG's Office does not know "that much" about what is going on in individual districts. US attorneys' offices have traditionally had to submit to Washington a frustratingly large number of reports, but the Bush administration has tripled those requirements, mandating weekly, monthly, yearly and sometimes even daily reports about every conceivable category of prosecution. Assistant US attorneys must now obtain prior approval from DOJ for indictments, plea agreements and sentencing recommendations in an unprecedented variety of cases. In some instances - the cases that arose out of the pre-Christmas 2006 mass arrests of illegal aliens, for example - the Bush administration Justice Department simply mandates exactly what the charges, plea agreement and sentence must be.
Further they have implemented a so-called "Urgent Report" requiring the US Attorney offices to immediately notify the Attorney General whenever any significant prosecution may have "high likelihood of coverage in news media, or Congressional interest."
Apparently this was Carol Lam's demise:
It was precisely such an Urgent Report that former San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam used to notify the Attorney General's Office on May 10, 2006 that search warrants were going to be conducted in the Randy "Duke" Cunningham case. The next day, of course, was when Alberto Gonzales's top aide wrote an email talking about the "very real problem we have right now" with Carol Lam.
The Democratic Party is doing yeoman's work in uncovering rocks and digging into the multitude of scandals that have festered over six years of no oversight by the Repugs. Alberto Gonzales is just a hapless stooge in the game.
Most important, however, no one should be fooled into thinking that shoving Alberto Gonzales into the drink will get the Department of Justice back on course. The Department of Justice, like the Department of Defense, the Department of State and every other agency of the federal government, has lost its way because of the motley crew that is commanding the entire fleet: Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, in no particular order.