1115.org

Much as I have enjoyed not having to write about Buttercheeks, not even having to think of him, it is now time to return to those distasteful tasks.

Buttercheeks, as he is want to do, is making distasteful news again. Distasteful to me, and no doubt, distasteful to him, too.

Murray Waas of the National Journal reported on Monday evening that Buttercheeks has been strangely reticent about the extent to which he had abdicated the running of the Justice Department to those two lovable, inexperienced youngsters, D. Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling. In retrospect, a lot of things may be starting to become clear, including how come Buttercheeks seems to know so very little about what really went on in the Justice Department.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides — who have since resigned because of their central roles in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys — extraordinary authority over the hiring and firing of most non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department. A copy of the order and other Justice Department records related to the conception and implementation of the order were provided to National Journal.

In the order, Gonzales delegated to his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, and his White House liaison “the authority, with the approval of the Attorney General, to take final action in matters pertaining to the appointment, employment, pay, separation, and general administration” of virtually all non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department, including all of the department’s political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation. Monica Goodling became White House liaison in April 2006, the month after Gonzales signed the order.

The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed.

A senior executive branch official familiar with the delegation of authority said in an interview that — as was the case with the firings of the U.S. attorneys and the selection of their replacements — the two aides intended to work closely with White House political aides and the White House counsel’s office in deciding which senior Justice Department officials to dismiss and whom to appoint to their posts. “It was an attempt to make the department more responsive to the political side of the White House and to do it in such a way that people would not know it was going on,” the official said.

Just in case it’s not clear enough, Buttercheeks was not running the Justice Department, Karl Rove and Harriet Meirs were. And they were doing it through Sampson and Goodling. Buttercheeks’ role was simply to:
A) sign off on everything
B) never ask any questions
C) take the heat later while Sampson and Goodling quietly resigned, dissembled and disappeared

But it gets better. The original proposal was to simplify even this plan by eliminating step A:

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.”

So in the end, Buttercheeks retained a rubber-stamping role.

As most people familiar with Waas’ work might suspect, he wrote a really long piece. It’s full of lots of good stuff beyond what I have stuffed into this post; well worth taking the time to read the whole thing. I’ll toss out a few more nuggets:

This does not mean Sampson and Goodling were in a position to directly hire and fire U.S. Attorneys — Gonzales’ order dealt with officials above career level, but below Senate-confirmed positions — but given the circumstances, their personnel power was still of tremendous importance, particularly as it relates to corruption prosecutions.

The picture Waas paints — and the picture most bloggers have picked up on and highlighted — is an unbelievable scenario where Goodling and Sampson were deciding which U.S. Attorneys to hire and fire at the same time as they controlled the hiring and firing of their supervisors. In other words, they were given the power to totally subvert the workings of Justice:

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.
[...]
“It would be an act of insanity and, frankly, implausible that the attorney general would grant authority to Kyle [Sampson] and Monica Goodling to make these decisions,” the official said, “But it would be frightening if they were serving as proxies for the White House…”

But that may not be all. Unless I’m mis-reading the language in which Waas paraphrases Buttercheeks’ memo, Sampson and Goodling also had the power to hire and fire Assistant U.S. Attorneys. (Surely they are part of that very broad category of “non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department, including all of the department’s political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation”?)

Assistant U.S. Attorneys, of course, are the people who do most of the real work on any prosecution. Controlling their strings would be a far cleaner way to manipulate prosecutions than having senators and congressmen call up U.S. attorneys in the dark of the night, or the whole messy business of leaning on U.S. Attorneys to quit, or firing senior officials in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

When you control the strings of the grunts who do all the real work, and the strings of the bosses who supervise them closely and the strings of their supervisors, you pretty much have the system by the balls. A discreet squeeze now and then is enough to keep the whole machinery running how you want it to.

One last, telling quote:

A correspondence record from Gonzales’s own files indicates that when Paul Corts, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for administration, transmitted a memo regarding the then-draft plan to Gonzales, information regarding the plan was ordered to be withheld from (Deputy Attorney General Paul) McNulty.

The official Justice Department spin is that there was nothing the least bit strange, surprising, unusual or sinister in Gonzales delegating this authority to Sampson and Goodling. Why then the guilty consciences and the “don’t-let-this-goody-good-bastard-know” secrecy?