Alberto Gonzales – Disgraceful Record, Dismal Leader

In Rough Justice – The Case Against Alberto Gonzales, a four part series, Andrew Cohen provides historical perspective for the issues behind Mr. Gonzales, his job performance at the state and national levels and recommends a replacement with all the traits that are missing from Alberto Gonzales.

Part 1 deals with the importance of understanding “that the attorney general in our federal system has to straddle a line between law and politics, between being the people’s attorney and his boss’ loyal cabinet member.”

… am I an advocate who must facilitate what my client already has decided to do? Or am I a counselor who may tell my client on occasion that what he or she wants to do is illegal or just plain wrong?

Gonzales has been charged, over and over again and both before and during his current tenure, as being President’s Bush’s in-house and in-court “yes” man, a lawyer whose main role has been to try to justify legally, at least on its face, what his boss already has decided for political or moral reasons to do anyway.

Leahy … expressed his concern that Gonzales did not possess the temperament, training, will, or motive to act independently from the man, President Bush, to whom Gonzales has served in one way or another ever since they both came to public service.

… he [Gonzales] was asked during an interview by folks at the Academy of Achievement to list his role models. His answer? “The three biggest influences of my life, in terms of maturing me as a person, were my mom, my dad and our President, who’s given me some wonderful opportunities. I’ve learned a lot from him in the various roles that I’ve seen him in, as a father, and as a governor, and as a president.”

Gonzales, says Katz, “doesn’t seem to see past the relationship with his boss” and has been “a willing accessory” to some of what Katz sees as the “worst excesses” of the administration’s policies.

Mr. Cohen then went on to contrast Gonzales with other attorney generals that were more interested in the law than than keeping their boss happy.

Eliot Richardson was summarily fired from the post in October 1973 when he refused to assent to the wishes of President Nixon, who wanted Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal.

[Janet] Reno famously vexed her boss [President Clinton] (so much so that he reportedly stopped talking to her) by appointing a special prosecutor to look into the Whitewater affair …

John Dean, President Richard Nixon’s legendary White House counsel, took the reasoning one step further in an email to me Monday. He wrote: “What is most important about the Department of Justice is to not politicize it, because it really must make decisions that effect the public interest, and the criminal justice system, and if Department is a highly political entity, it will lose trust, it will lose the best and brightest attorneys who want to work there, and then we all lose.”

In Part II of Rough Justice – The Case Against Alberto Gonzales, Mr Cohen reviews three examples of Mr. Gonzales performance before he became the nations AG. “The roads to the current scandal over the dismissal of federal prosecutors, to the Justice Department’s rabid support for warrantless domestic surveillance, and to department’s tepid defense of civil liberties for resident aliens all are paved with stones that Gonzales and Bush laid down before the former took the oath of office in early 2005.”

The first example shows that there would be no clemency petitions granted by then Governor George Bush.

According to [Alan] Berlow, Gonzales “repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence” (emphasis in original) in a series of memoranda Gonzales prepared for the governor’s review as part of the state’s clemency process.

The next examples according to Mr. Cohen, “provides us with a legal link from Texas’ death row to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.” He summaries Gonzales’ views on international law as documented by Alan Berlow on Slate.com.

In one case, involving a Mexican national name Irineo Tristan Montoya, Berlow writes that Gonzales told Mexican officials that since Texas had not signed the Vienna Convention the state was not bound to determine whether local police had violated it when they arrested Montoya for murder. Problem is, as Berlow noted, Article 6 of the Constitution states that federal treaties are the “supreme law of the land” and cannot be trumped by state laws or policies. That’s first-year law school stuff, by the way.

In another case Berlow chronicled, Gonzales described as a “harmless error” an acknowledged violation of the Vienna Convention in the case of a Canadian national named Joseph Stanley Faulder. Faulder was executed shortly thereafter. And then what happened? In March 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that America had violated on a wide scale the right of 52 Mexicans, including 15 in Texas.

From this disregard for international law, there should be no surprise with the Gonzales’ “torture” memo.

As White House counsel, Gonzales was in a position to at least record an objection to our government’s change of long-standing policy when it came to the use of torture against enemies captured in the war on terror. It is unlikely that such an objection would have prevailed, given the Machiavellian currents then making their way through the White House and Pentagon, but the President’s official lawyer could have been and should have been as brave as some of the lower-level staff attorneys within the Defense Department who rightfully saw how far afield their superiors were going in changing basic fundamental tenets of law and policy.

Mr. Cohen concluded Part II with:

On Tuesday, I asked Berlow, who does not cover Gonzales on a regular basis, whether he sees any connection between the Gonzales he studied in Texas and the one he sees now as Attorney General. He told me: “His priority has always been to do his boss’s bidding.” Berlow also told me that Gonzales’ pre-Justice record shows a cavalier pattern of carelessly justifying policy decisions. “The administration has an attitude of “anything goes” and “we will find a rationale to justify what it is we want to do–if we are caught,” Berlow told me. “What was astonishing in Texas is that they got away with it.”

“Sycophant” is just one of many uncomplimentary but pointed words used by my sources for this series to describe Gonzales’ work and attitude toward his role as counselor. For now, until tomorrow, let’s leave it to former White House counsel John Dean, who knows a great deal about the way the Justice Department should be run, or not run, to sum up Gonzales’ qualifications before he took over as Attorney General. Dean told me in an email earlier this week: “Frankly, I have a degree of sympathy for Alberto Gonzales, who I suspect is a terrific Texas real estate attorney.”

In Part III, Mr Cohen documents the “dismal” performance of Alberto Gonzales as AG for our nation and that he “cannot exercise the independent judgment necessary to properly fulfill his duties at the Justice Department.”

… Over and over again, the Attorney General has sided with the White House and against a national legal consensus; over and over again he has failed to act as a checkpoint, or even a speed bump, to halt the expansion of presidential power. At a time when the Constitution is under enormous political and legal pressure thanks to the war on terrorism, we have on our hands an Attorney General who still shills for the President as if he were working out of the White House or the Governor’s mansion in Austin.

For example, he vigorously defended the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program even though most legal scholars believe it to violate both the Constitution and federal statutory law. … At no point, at least so far as we know, has the Attorney General questioned the constitutionality of the program or otherwise offered a legal viewpoint that contradicts that of the White House.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s prosecution of alleged terrorists has been spotty, at best, and federal judges have grown increasingly unwilling to accept blind government assertions of national security interests. The most obvious example is the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, whom federal prosecutors alleged was a key conspirator in the plot to attack America on September 11, 2001.

Then there is the leadership of the Justice Department, or lack thereof, in brokering a compromise that might have quickly ended the legal standoff over the rights of the terror detainees currently held down at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as well as individuals who are now or who in the future may be designated by the President as “enemy combatants.

Which brings us to this month’s bad news at the Department of Justice. In assessing the Attorney General’s role in the scandal over the U.S. attorneys, there are really only two main possibilities. Either Gonzales had no idea that the White House and certain politicians were pressuring his subordinates (his federal prosecutors) to the point of dismissing eight of them. Or he knew about the pressure and allowed it to occur. In the first instance, Gonzales was not providing vital leadership. He was not sticking up for his employees the way any manager ought to stick up for his employees in the face of pressure from on-high. In the second instance, he agreed with the White House that the eight attorneys deserved to be fired, which means he finds it acceptable for the Department of Justice to be politicized in a way that goes way beyond where it has been before. In neither instance is his [leadership]performance acceptable.

Now, an Attorney General with this sort of a hapless record no doubt would like to be able to say to the American people: “in spite of all of this, I have helped make you safer where you live.” But, here, too, Gonzales has failed. According to the National Association of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, big-city murder rates have risen 10 percent over the last two years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation itself puts the violent crime increase at 3.7 percent for January-June 2006. Also, drug use apparently in increasing in the nation’s heartland.

Mr. Cohen concludes Part III with, “You can add it up any way you like, and come at it from a conservative or liberal position, but it still totals this: a man who was proven to be unqualified for the job of Attorney General got it anyway and made a complete mess of things.”

In the first three parts of his series, Mr. Cohen made the case for the firing of the current AG for miserable performance. In Part IV he recommends a solution for this problem by making “the case for a particular successor.” Gonzales’ successor should, “be strong and independent — and with a long history of being a successful federal prosecutor. He or she must not be beholden to the White House or be an ideologue. He or she must possess the respect of the foot soldiers within the Department of Justice and thus be able to restore some of the lost credibility, confidence and morale that marks the current regime.”

In my humble opinion, and recognizing that there may be a few other worthy candidates, there is only one person who perfectly currently fits the bill. He is a Bush-appointee, either an independent or a Republican, but not a partisan or a crony or a hack like so many other current appointees. He has a sterling record of integrity and doggedness. He is obviously his own man and has shown a remarkable tendency during his career as a prosecutor for rankling partisans on both sides of the aisle. He is beholden to no one. His nomination to head the Justice Department by President Bush, and his ratification by the Congress, would send a clear message to the country that our government is willing to turn the page on the sordid recent history of the Office of Attorney General. His name? Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Can you think of a better candidate to restore honor and integrity to the Justice Department than the man who just took on the White House, and won, with the perjury and obstruction trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby? Can you think of a person more likely to erase the standing charge of cronyism that seeps through the current administration like a stink bomb? Can you think of someone whose political and legal reputation throughout the country is as high right now, among Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike? Can you think of a better choice than a Washington outsider who made his bones as an Elliot Ness-like figure long before he won his latest case?

Mr. Cohen admits that it is not likely that the Decider will take his advice, but Mr. Gonzales needs to leave.