Justice Dept. Firings Included 3 U.S. Attorneys Investigating GOP Pols
Chalk up another instance of the Republican Party's ongoing culture of corruption. According to an article in Sunday's issue of The Washington Post penned by Dan Eggen, at least three of the seven plus United States Attorneys fired during a recent purge by the Bush administration were investivating illegal activities by once or current Republican members of Congress.
All but one of the U.S. attorneys recently fired by the Justice Department had positive job reviews before they were dismissed, but many ran into political trouble with Washington over issues ranging from immigration to the death penalty, according to prosecutors, congressional aides and others familiar with the cases.Two months after the firings first began to make waves on Capitol Hill, it has also become clear that most of the prosecutors were overseeing significant public-corruption investigations at the time they were asked to leave. Four of the probes target Republican politicians or their supporters, prosecutors and other officials said.
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But the cases that have gotten most of the attention among Democrats in Congress involve public-corruption investigations. In San Diego, [Carol] Lam oversaw the probe that resulted in the guilty plea of then-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a Republican. Two others connected to that case, including a former senior CIA official, were indicted two days before Lam left the job on Thursday.
[Daniel] Bogden in Nevada and [Paul] Charlton in Arizona were also in the midst of investigations targeting current or former Republican members of Congress when they were fired. And in New Mexico, Iglesias's office had been examining alleged wrongdoing involving state Democrats.
The fact that so many of these attorneys, all of whom were appointed by President Bush (and thus are not susceptible to charges of liberal bias), were investigating corruption among the GOP caucuses on Capitol Hill raises some serious questions about the motivations of the Bush administration. What's more, it also raises serious questions about the media's unwillingness to cover this story with even a tenth of the fervor with which they dealt with relatively unimportant scandals like Whitewater and Monica-gate during the previous administration. Had President Clinton even considered firing a prosecutor looking into corrupt Democratic Party officials, the David Broders of the world would have been up in arms, not resting until each of the fired attorneys was restored to his or her office. But such a move by the Bush administration elicits coverage at the bottom of a story on page 11 of The Post and few other mentions from the pillars of the establishment media beyond that.
What's clear is this: There may not be a proven causality between the investigations by these U.S. attorneys into Republican corruption and their dismissal by the Bush administration -- but there is certainly a correlation. And where there's smoke in Washington, there's usually fire. As such, there's almost no reason why this story is not garnering the type of frontpage, above-the-fold treatment it almost certainly would have during the previous administration.
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