Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

Now that the Justice Department’s Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility (’OPR’) are expanding their internal probe beyond U.S. Attorney firings to include investigating hiring practices of Monica Goodling and others, it’s worth another look back at last year’s fight between OPR Chief H. Marshall Jarrett, Attorney General Gonzales, and the White House.

Jarrett has served as OPR’s Chief Counsel and Director since 1998 when then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed to the position in the Clinton Administration. Jarrett was a career prosecutor — not a political hack — and has been a Department of Justice employee for more than 32 years.

According to a report by CBS News, Jarrett duked it out with Gonzales and President Bush. in the spring of 2006 when he was stonewalled while investigating the role of Justice Department attorneys in creating the warrantless surveillance progam authorizing NSA to conduct domestic surveillance.

Memos from Jarreett to “Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, in February, March and April of [2006],” CBS reported, “show that while Gonzales publicly told the Senate that OPR was investigating, Jarrett was complaining to higher-ups that he was “unable to move forward” because of the lack of security clearances for himself and six staff members.”

Two weeks ago former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified that in 2004 Gonzales tried to push renewal of a domestic surveillance bill past then Attorney General John Ashcroft after Ashcroft and Comey had already concluded that a warrantless domestic surveillance program was unconstititonal.

Given Jarrett’s battles with Ashcroft and President Bush over these highly controversial legal moves in the past, it would appear that his record as a career prosecutor — and not a political hack — will serve this investigation well.

Glenn Fine, the Justice Department’s Inspector General, just informed the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning that the joint probe launched by his office and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigating the firings of career U.S. Attorneys is expanding.

Other issues that they now “intend to investigate [include] allegations regarding Monica Goodling’s and other’s actions in DOJ hiring and personnel decisions; allegations concerning hiring for the DOJ Honros Program and Law School Intern Program; and allegations concerning hiring practices in the DOJ Civil Rights Divisions.” (Inset, below)

That means the question asked by Gonzales Watch several weeks ago — whether Goodling’s limited grant of immunity would have any affect on the DOJ’s investigation of her — has just been answered. The answer is a resounding “No.”

This should please President Bush, who said at a press conference last week that the “internal investigation taking place at the Justice Department…will be an exhaustive investigation. And if there’s wrongdoing, it will be taken care of.”

A new USA Today editorial in today’s paper comes down hard against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, concluding that when the Justice Department is “tied at hip’ to White House, [it] hurts respect for law.”

The paper concludes that “[t]estimony, e-mails, interviews and news accounts reveal a pattern of mismanagement that justifies the extraordinary “no confidence” vote on the attorney general planned next month in the Senate.

Constitutional lawyer and political consultant Bruce Fein calls for U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ impeachment in Wednesday’s edition of the Washington Times.

Fein argues that “[e]vidence continues to mount that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has committed an impeachable offense: namely, turning law into slabs of political calculation with ulterior motives.”

Citing James Madison for support, Fein maintains that Madison thought “impeachment would be proper for a civil officer who “suffers [his subordinates] to perpetrate with impunity high crimes and misdemeanors against the United States, or neglects to superintend their conduct, so as to check their excesses.”

Demoralizing U.S. Attorneys and their staff, creating increased public cynicism about the law, and turning federal judges and juries into skeptics of cases brought by federal prosecutors. Those are all reasons that Fine cits for Gonzales’ removal.

But the real kicker is his argument that, in keeping Gonzales’ as Attorney General “the greater danger to the nation’s checks and balances would be employing impeachment too infrequently rather than too readily.”"