This coming Tuesday Senator Schumer will preside over an interesting Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled "Is the DOJ Politicizing the Hiring and Firing of U.S. Attorneys? "
You might recall that when the Attorney General appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month one of the topics concerned a recent spate of firings among US attorneys. Apparently seven were fired in the period after the November election and replaced before the convening of the 110th Congress. Some of the firings and replacements have all of the hallmarks of political patronage. The first involved the firing of H.E. "Bud" Cummins III who had served as the US Attorney in Little Rock for the last 5 years. He had was told by officials in DC there was nothing wrong with his performance, but that officials in Washington wanted to give the job to another GOP loyalist. The loyalist the administration wanted to reward was J. Timothy Griffin, a well known political operative and former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove. Maybe Karl needs subpoena power to plow Arkansas for dirt to use against Hillary Clinton or maybe Governor Mike Huckabee?
Dan Eggen of Washington Post concludes his February 4, 2007 article by quoting Cummins:
"the political aspect of it shouldn't really be a shock to anybody. . . . Every U.S. attorney knows they serve at the pleasure of the president."
Paul Kiel of TPMuckraker.com is less sanguine. He notes that in his article Eggan reports "(o)ne administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing personnel issues, said the spate of firings was the result of "pressure from people who make personnel decisions outside of Justice who wanted to make some things happen in these places." Kiel concludes that:
Instead of nominating local, qualified attorneys whose philosophy jibes with the administration (as was the traditional practice), the nomination of U.S. Attorneys has been subsumed into the Republican Party's political machine.
Again, why replace the US Attorney for Arkansas with a Rovian hack? The only reason I can thing of is to have a political operative with subpoena power digging dirt on either Governor Huckabee or Hillary.
