1115.org

The Republican party — whether it is the Bush administration or the Congressional leadership — seems to be doing a whole lot of gambling these days.

On the prosecutor firing business, they seem to be gambling that America really isn’t going to be very concerned with this scandal, really isn’t going to care very much about it. That America will buy the spin the Republican machine has been putting out. (Then there’s that whole other gamble that Bush has embarked on—relating to war funding and withdrawal timelines…)

The spin that U.S. Attorneys are, after all, political appointees. They serve at the pleasure of the President. They can be fired by the President at will. So there was nothing wrong with firing them. This whole controversy is just a storm in a teacup. There’s no crime. It’s certainly regrettable that the Justice Department initially didn’t pay very much attention to what reasons they were giving for the firings. They should have just been up front and told the truth. So it really wasn’t well handled. Very poor PR, as a matter of fact. But there’s no reason at all to make such a big deal out of the whole thing. No crime. No harm, no foul. Nothing to see here, nothing at all.

The key to this spin is sleight of hand using the word “political”. The key idea they are trying to sell America is that Democrats have only one real complaint — that the prosecutors were fired for political reasons — and of course it is okay to fire them for political reasons. They are, after all, political appointees.

Josh Marshall has a brilliant takedown of this argument:

This use of the word ‘political’ is at the heart of Sampson’s and others effort to lie their way out of what happened here.

‘Political’ can mean many things in different contexts. US Attorneys are ‘political’ appointees, in that they are overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, drawn from among the president’s political supporters. They are also subject to ‘political’ direction, in that they are expected to follow the administration’s law enforcement priorities — more or less gun prosecutions, crack downs on dead beat dads or pornography, etc.

Neither of these meanings of the word ‘political’ are what this investigation is about. And, like others, Sampson is using these multiple meanings of the word as a dodge. The charge against Sampson and crew is not that they fired them for ‘political’ reasons. The charge is that they fired these prosecutors for not using their law enforcement powers to help the Republican party.

Set aside for the moment whether the charge is proven or whether you think it’s true. That is the charge. That’s what this is about.

That’s what the flap over the firings themselves is about. But this isn’t just a one-ring circus at this point.

Alberto Gonzales has a ring all to himself. His flat-out lies, his extremely clumsy attempts to extricate himself from his flat out lies, and now the spotlight that Kyle Sampson has shone on the lies as well as the clumsy attempts, will keep Gonzales in the limelight for a good long while to come. Painfully dragging out the scandal for the Republicans.

(Speaking of clumsy attempts, Republicans seem to be watching Buttercheeks with all the fascinated horror of a china shop owner watching an extremely drunk ballerina elephant in tutus who has just lurched into the shop, and is determined to execute the ballet equivalent of a triple axel toe loop before she leaves.)

And it is entirely possible that, in the next week or ten days, the media will come to focus on the perjury and cover-up aspects of the scandal. Senior Justice Department officials went before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and they made false statements. It now turns out that some of the false statements made by Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General William Moschella may have been inadvertent. That still doesn’t excuse those that weren’t. And the story behind the inadvertent falsehoods is even more juicy. At some point surely it is bound to take center stage for a while?

There is, after all, clear evidence that Kyle Sampson — the chief of staff to the Attorney General of the United States — drafted a letter to the Senate Judiciary which contained a deliberate material lie. And that Christopher Oprison, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office, approved the letter, even though he knew the letter contained a deliberate material lie. That’s a conspiracy right there. A conspiracy in which the Justice Department and the White House joined together to lie to the Senate Judiciary Committee in writing, in order to conceal the truth about Karl Rove’s involvement in the firings.

Sampson and Oprison rolled the dice on that one. Am I the only one convinced that they lost that roll? Badly.