http://www.slate.com/id/2161260/fr/flyout
March 5, 2007
Specter Detector
U.S. attorney scandal update: Who's to blame for those alarming
Patriot Act revisions?
By Dahlia Lithwick
The U.S. attorneys purge scandal is heating up.
The House and Senate have convened hearings for Tuesday, promising an
orgy of named names and pointed fingers. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.,
now admits what he once denied:
that he may have had a hand in the removal of New Mexico's U.S.
attorney.
And the senior Justice Department official who personally canned the
U.S. attorneys has just announced the date of his resignation.
But as the political scandal spreads, the question at its heart gets
less and less public attention:
Who changed the Patriot Act to make it easier to replace U.S.
attorneys without oversight, and how did it happen with nobody
looking?
U.S. attorneys are well aware that they serve at the president's
pleasure, but new wording in the Patriot Act made it worth the
president's while to fire a big, fat lot of them and hire a group of
new ones.
And while certainly half the scandal is that the Justice Department
did that—let eight U.S. attorneys go, seemingly for no reason—we seem
to have forgotten that even without the mass firings, this law had
been changed in the sneakiest way imaginable.
The background:
When Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act last year, it included
little-noticed language that changed the way U.S. attorneys would be
appointed if their predecessors were removed in the middle of their
term.
Under the old regime, interim U.S. attorneys needed to be confirmed by
the Senate after 120 days.
If they weren't, federal district judges could select their
replacement.
The new language removed both judicial and congressional oversight of
the interim U.S. attorneys, letting DOJ anoint them indefinitely.
This served three important goals:
consolidating presidential power, diminishing oversight, and ensuring
that "interim" prosecutors had permanent jobs.
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Another day another Republican scandal.
Harry
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