I have been closely following the plodding progress of the Congressional committee investigations into the Attorney General's firing of "underperforming" U.S. Attorneys. While there are so many questions one can wonder about in this scandal, here is the one that is bothering me the most tonight: why are they allowed to redact information about all U.S. Attorneys and USA offices other than those pertaining to the fired individuals?
I make my living as an employment lawyer, and the bread and butter evidence in any case about a person being fired is whether (or not) other employees who were performing equally badly were treated the same way. Here, it seems that the holy grail proof would be if other U.S. Attorneys who were performing similarly to these eight, but who were not indicting Republicans or who were indicting Democrats or were otherwise demonstrating themselves to be "good soldiers" for the Bush Administration, managed to keep their jobs. Yet, in the newest sets of documents among the 2,000 pages released by the DOJ today (bury the trash in the Friday news cycle, do 'ya?), all information pertaining to U.S. Attorneys other than "The Eight" is redacted. Which means we are looking at this in a vacuum, unable to see how the fired Eight compared to those who were not fired, as it isn't just the names that are redacted--it is all information pertaining to people or offices other than those of the Eight.
Why is the DOJ able to get away with that?
13 April 2007
Does anyone else wonder this?
Posted by Lisa at 10:29 PM
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3 comments:
I don't know why, but all the checks and balances we are supposed to have don't seem to have been working throughout the Bush Administration. Is it because we just haven't been vigilant enough, as citizens, or have we lost whatever say we have in our own government? It seems no one has been paying attention to the things that really count.
Ever since 2000, I've had the distinct feeling that the Bush Administration has been pushing far beyond the normal limits of the executive branch and getting away with it because so few people have the cojones to call them on it.
This US Attorney scandal is just another in a long line. Doesn't surprise me at all, unfortunately.
I'm stumped too. How do they get away with it? It also always amazes me that these politicians spend all their time denying that they had any knowledge, and it's always proven that they did. How many times to they have to be caught lying?
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