Gonzales delegated dereliction of duty

By Libby

Murray Waas delivers the latest scoop on just how deeply politicized our Justice Dept. has become under the Bush regime and also sheds some light on why Gonzales repeatedly claimed he knew nothing about the workings of his own agency. It turns out it's because he apparently really knew nothing and routinely authorized the decisions of a couple of young, completely inexperienced White House lap dogs to whom he turned over vital responsibilties he rightly should have been overseeing himself.

An original draft of Gonzales's delegation of authority to Sampson and Goodling was so broad that it did not even require the two aides to obtain the final approval of the attorney general before moving to dismiss other department officials, according to records obtained by National Journal.

The department's Office of Legal Counsel feared that such an unconditional delegation of authority was unconstitutional, the documents show. As a result, the original delegation was rewritten so that in its final form the order required "any proposed appointments or removals of personnel" be "presented to the Attorney General... for approval, and each appointment or removal shall be made in the name of the Attorney General."

White House apologist Tony Fratto stated the order was perfectly legal and had no idea why, if this was so, that it was rendered in such super double secrecy that even the highest ranking Justice officials were kept in the dark about the decision. This may explain it for him.

A senior Justice Department official, who did not know of Gonzales's delegation of authority until contacted by National Journal, said that it posed a serious threat to the integrity of the criminal-justice system because it gave Sampson, Goodling, and the White House control over the hiring of senior officials in the Justice Department's Criminal Division, which oversees all politically sensitive public corruption cases, at the same time that they held authority to hire and fire U.S. attorneys.

"If you are controlling who is going to be a U.S. attorney and who isn't going to be,... firing them outside the traditional process... and the same people are deciding who are going to be their supervisors back in Washington... there is too much of a potential for mischief, for abuse," the official said.

The bottom line is the White House engaged in actively manipulating Justice to protect the criminal actions of their own party and to create the illusion of criminality in the Democratic Party. Worse yet, Justice is not the only department that has been exploited in this manner. There was a piece in 2005 that reviewed the Plum Book appointments of this White House and the seeding of incompetent Bush loyalists into positions of authority four and five layers deep into the bureaucracy.

The GOP spent six years blaming big government for the failures of the current adminstration but the reality is it was the GOP's bad governance that has rendered our country unable to deal effectively or efficiently with disasters large or small. The situation at Justice is one of the most egregious, but it's only the tip of the iceberg that could to sink our ship of state at any moment.