NYP op-ed disappears Bush’s politicization of the Justice Department
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on July 13th, 2010 4:46 am by HL
NYP op-ed disappears Bush’s politicization of the Justice Department
In a New York Post op-ed, former Bush Justice Department official Kris Kobach accused the Obama Justice Department of pursuing a “weak” lawsuit against Arizona’s controversial immigration law — which Kobach helped draft — for “purely political reasons,” in contrast to “past administrations.” In fact, the Bush Justice Department was found to be highly politicized, and legal experts agree that the Arizona law is “unconstitutional.”
New York Post: “Behind US v. Arizona: pure politics” — unlike “past administrations”
Bush administration adviser Kobach claimed that Obama DOJ’s decision to sue AZ over immigration law is “pure politics” and accused Obama administration of politicizing the Justice Department. In a July 12 editorial, Kobach — former counsel and chief adviser to Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft and explored the Bush administration’s “reasons for the removals of the U.S. Attorneys and whether they were removed for partisan political purposes,” found that the firings were “an unprecedented removal of a group of high-level Department officials.” The report concluded:
In sum, we believe that the process used to remove the nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006 was fundamentally flawed. While Presidential appointees can be removed for any reason or for no reason, as long as it is not an illegal or improper reason, Department officials publicly justified the removals as the result of an evaluation that sought to replace underperforming U.S. Attorneys. In fact, we determined that the process implemented largely by Kyle Sampson, Chief of Staff to the Attorney General, was unsystematic and arbitrary, with little oversight by the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, or any other senior Department official. In choosing which U.S. Attorneys to remove, Sampson did not adequately consult with the Department officials most knowledgeable about their performance, or even examine formal evaluations of each U.S. Attorney’s Office, despite his representations to the contrary.
[…]
The Department’s removal of the U.S. Attorneys and the controversy it created severely damaged the credibility of the Department and raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecutive decisions. We believe that this investigation, and final resolution of the issues raised in this report, can help restore confidence in the Department by fully describing the serious failures in the process used to remove the U.S. Attorneys and by providing lessons for the Department in how to avoid such failures in the future.
The report also expressed concerns that the offices “were not able to fully investigate” the “most serious allegation” that the removal of David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, occurred in order “to influence voter fraud and public corruption prosecutions” due to the unwillingness of many Bush administration officials to testify, including “Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and William Kelley.”
A 2008 DOJ investigation concluded Bush deputy assistant attorney general “considered political and ideological affiliations in hiring career attorneys” in the DOJ, in violation of federal law. In July 2008, the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded its investigation into whether politics and ideology were considered in “hiring, transferring, and assigning cases to career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.” The report reported that Bush’s interim U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman sought voter registration fraud indictments against members of ACORN right before the 2006 midterm senatorial elections, despite the Justice Department regulations that:
urge federal prosecutors to be “extremely careful” about conducting voter fraud probes in the weeks before an election, warning that such probes could become campaign issues. Schlozman insisted his actions were proper and that no policy required him to delay the indictments.
[…]
“It is deeply troubling that after weeks of preparation Mr. Schlozman appears to have misled the committee and the public about his decision to file an election eve lawsuit in direct conflict with longstanding Justice Department policy,” Leahy said.
Legal experts — and even Fox’s Napolitano – dispute Kobach’s claim that AZ lawsuit is “weak”
Fox News’ Napolitano: Arizona law “is unconstitutional” because AZ “can’t write a law that says the federal law means something different in Arizona than it does in the other 49 states.” Contrary to Kobach’s claim that the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Arizona’s controversial immigration enforcement law is “weak,” Fox legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano railed against the Arizona law, calling it “un-American.” Napolitano called the law “unconstitutional” and noted that the Supreme Court has ruled that immigration laws are “strictly a federal issue.” From the testified that the two were “career” attorneys who had “been in the [Civil Rights] Division for 30 years” and had “worked in the administration of George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and many other Presidents.” Indeed, Rosenbaum was reportedly once promoted to the head of voting rights in the Civil Rights Division by former President George H.W. Bush. Perez also testified that this was “a case about career people disagreeing with career people.”
Civil Rights Division decided to drop the case against three of the defendants for insufficient evidence. Perez also noted that “no citizen has even alleged that he or she was intimidated from voting,” which “was clear to the Justice Department last spring, which is why they took the course of action that they did.” A July 2 Main Justice article further reported that “no voters at all in the Philadelphia precinct have come forward to allege intimidation,” adding, “The complaints have come from white Republican poll watchers, who have given no evidence they were registered to vote in the majority black precinct.”
