Removal of attorneys common

WASHINGTON – Three weeks ago, Justice Department officials settled on a “talking point” to rebut Democratic accusations that the Bush administration had wrongly injected politics into law enforcement when it dismissed eight U.S. attorneys.

Why not focus on the Clinton administration’s having “fired all 93 U.S. attorneys” when Janet Reno became attorney general in March 1993, a Justice Department aide asked in one memo.

The message has been effective. What followed has been a surge of complaints on blogs and talk radio that the Clinton administration first politicized the Justice Department.

The facts, it turns out, are more complicated.

In a March 4 memo titled “Draft Talking Points,” Justice Department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos asked: “The WH (White House) is under the impression that we did not remove all the Clinton USAs (U.S. attorneys) in 2001 like he did when he took office. Is that true?”

That is mostly true, replied D. Kyle Sampson, then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. “Clinton fired all Bush USAs in one fell swoop. We fired all Clinton USAs but staggered it out more and permitted some to stay on a few months,” he said.

A few minutes later, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty replied to the same memo. “On the issue of Clinton USAs, we called each one and had them give us a timeframe. Most were gone by late April. In contrast, Clinton DoJ told all but a dozen in early March to be gone immediately,” McNulty said.

The difference appears minor. Both McNulty and Sampson acknowledged the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration, had brought in a new slate of U.S. attorneys within a few months of taking office.

But historical data compiled by the Senate shows the same pattern going back to President Reagan. Reagan replaced 89 of the 93 U.S. attorneys in his first two years in office. President Clinton also had 89 new U.S. attorneys in his first two years, while President Bush had 88 new U.S. attorneys in his first two years in office.

In a similar vein, the Justice Department recently supplied Congress with a district-by-district listing of U.S. attorneys who served before the current Bush administration. The list shows that in 1981, during Reagan’s first year in office, 71 of 93 districts had new U.S. attorneys. In 1993, during Clinton’s first year, 80 of 93 districts had new U.S. attorneys.

Nonetheless, the idea that Clinton and Reno broke with precedent and fired all U.S. attorneys upon taking office has played a key role in the public debate in recent weeks. In the conservative media, Reno’s abrupt firing of all the U.S. attorneys had been described as extreme and unprecedented.

Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, knows the story first-hand.

“I am the one who took the message,” he said in an interview Wednesday. In 1993, he was the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh and the liaison between the outgoing George H. W. Bush administration and the incoming Clinton administration. “We had been asking them for months: ‘When do you want our resignations?’,” he said.

The answer came in a meeting with Webster Hubbell, the associate attorney general, in mid-March. “He said, ‘I have good news and bad news. The good news is the attorney general wants you to stay until your successor is confirmed. The bad news she wants your resignations by the end of the week’,” Corbett said.

Despite Reno’s request for all their resignations, some U.S. attorneys stayed on the job for several more months.

In Los Angeles, for example, Terree A. Bowers, a Republican, had been appointed interim U.S. attorney in 1992, and he served through 1993, Clinton’s first year in office. In November, Nora Manella, Clinton’s choice for the post, was confirmed by the Senate.

In New Jersey, Michael Chertoff, a 1990 appointee of President George H.W. Bush, continued on into the Clinton administration before leaving in 1994. He is now the secretary of Homeland Security.

Many former U.S. attorneys draw a distinction between the political nature of the appointment and the apolitical role of law enforcement.

“The process of selection is political, but once you are there, you can’t be political,” said Daniel French, a Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney in Syracuse, N.Y. “I don’t think there is anything wrong with (former White House counsel) Harriet Miers saying, ‘We want all new people in office,’ ” he added. But the administration would cross the line if it interfered in a politically sensitive prosecution, he said.

Tom Heffelfinger, a former U.S. attorney from Minnesota who served under the current President Bush – as well as in his father’s administration – said a White House move to fire a large number of its own U.S. attorneys is quite different from replacing the appointees of a previous administration.

“In my opinion, it is not comparable,” said Heffelfinger, a Republican who resigned voluntarily from his Justice Department post last year.

“When you have a transition between presidents – especially presidents of different parties – a U.S. attorney anticipates that you will be replaced in due course. But the unwritten, No. 1 rule at DOJ is that once you become a U.S. attorney you have to leave politics at the door,” he said.