IT'S ONLY FITTING THAT THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER WOULD HAVE THE WORST ATTORNEY GENERAL EVER

Next week's edition of Legal Times carries an interview with Daniel Metcalfe, former director of the Office of Information and Privacy at the U.S. Justice Department. He is widely respected on both sides of the aisle as a nonpartisan law enforcement professional who devoted over 30 years of his life to the Department of Justice. And he's aghast at how quickly Alberto Gonzales was able to destroy-- "shatter" was the word he used-- DoJ's long and sacrosanct tradition of independence. He started there during the Nixon Administration and he was asked to rank Alberto Gonzales in comparison to all the Attorneys General since 1971 when he joined the department as an intern. He's worked for more than a dozen including Ed Meese and John Mitchell, two who have been considered especially corrupt. "But nothing," he says, "compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales."

Under Gonzales, though, almost immediately from the time of his arrival in February 2005, this changed quite noticeably. First, there was extraordinary turnover in the political ranks, including the majority of even Justice's highest-level appointees. It was reminiscent of the turnover from the second Reagan administration to the first Bush administration in 1989, only more so. Second, the atmosphere was palpably different, in ways both large and small. One need not have had to be terribly sophisticated to notice that when Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey left the department in August 2005 his departure was quite abrupt, and that his large farewell party was attended by neither Gonzales nor (as best as could be seen) anyone else on the AG's personal staff.

Third, and most significantly for present purposes, there was an almost immediate influx of young political aides beginning in the first half of 2005 (e.g., counsels to the AG, associate deputy attorneys general, deputy associate attorneys general, and deputy assistant attorneys general) whose inexperience in the processes of government was surpassed only by their evident disdain for it.

Having seen this firsthand in a range of different situations for nearly two years before I retired, I found it not at all surprising that the recent U.S. Attorney problems arose in the first place and then were so badly mishandled once they did.

Metcalfe is a registered independent and prides himself in being nonpartisan. But he recognizes something in the Bush Regime that he hasn't seen in the past. And in the second-- current-- term it's gotten a lot worse. "In my experience over 11 presidential administrations, from Nixon I to what can be called Bush III, there is an unmistakable drop-off in overall appointment quality during a second presidential term-- and this definitely is more so during a Republican administration. Perhaps this is due to there being a lower quality of political appointees in Republican administrations to begin with, given that, by and large, they give up more than Democrats do to enter government service, especially with the post-Watergate ethics restrictions that all government officials face.

"This observation is nothing new, by the way; one need only look at the relative ages and experience levels of comparable appointees in successive administrations to see it. So when you enter the second term of a Republican administration, you get the worst of all possible worlds: You actually see some influential political appointees who are, to put it bluntly, too subject-matter ignorant to even realize how ignorant they are. (This is assuming that, if they knew, they'd actually care.)"

Asked if the politicization of the department hastened his retirement, Metcalfe said "Yes... the process of agency functioning, however, became dramatically different almost immediately after Gonzales arrived. No longer was emphasis placed on accomplishing something with the highest-quality product in a timely fashion; rather, it became a matter of making sure that a 'consensus' was achieved, regardless of how long that might take and with little or no concern that quality would suffer in such a 'lowest common denominator' environment. And heaven help anyone, career or noncareer employee, if that 'consensus' did not include whatever someone in the White House might think about something, be it large, small or medium-sized. In short, the culture markedly shifted to one in which avoiding any possibility of disagreement anywhere was the overriding concern, as if 'consensus' were an end unto itself. Undergirding this, what's more, was the sad fact that so many political appointees in 2005 and 2006 were so obviously thinking not much further than their next (i.e., higher-level) position, in some place where they could 'max out' by the end of Bush's second term... Yes, it became quite clear that under Gonzales, the department placed no more than secondary value on the standards that I and my office had valued so heavily for the preceding 25 years-- accuracy, integrity, responsibility and quality of decision-making being chief among them. Had I stayed as director of OIP, I might have been working for a Monica Goodling protege by now."

One can safely assume that working for a Monica Goodling protege is not what he had in mind. In fact, he seems to feel that the entire scandal revolving around the firing of the 8 U.S. Attorneys had a great deal to do with the abysmally poor quality of managers Gonzales brought into the department. "On one side, you had hard-nosed prosecutors who, for the most part, already had several years' experience under their belts (with little micromanagement from Ashcroft's people) and knew what they were doing already. On the other side, you had political aides who, among other things, had precious little management experience for their positions and were not necessarily adept at playing well with others, even when those others were political appointees like themselves. One need look no further than the extensively disclosed e-mails from Kyle Sampson, Mike Elston [chief of staff to McNulty], Monica Goodling and [Deputy Associate Attorney General] Will Moschella to get a clear picture of this."

Morale at the DoJ is extraordinarily low, particularly among the professional staff. They have always prided themselves on the high-quality administration of justice, regardless of who is in the White House. That's over. "The strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip-- through their public affairs, legislative affairs and legal policy offices, for example, as well as where you ordinarily would expect such a connection (i.e., Justice's Office of Legal Counsel). I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren't even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.

"This matters greatly to Justice Department employees of my generation. They are now the senior career cadre there, with the high-grade institutional knowledge that carries the department from one administration to the next, and when they see a new attorney general come from the White House Counsel's Office with a wave of young 'Bushies' in tow and find their worst expectations quickly met, they just as quickly lose respect for nearly all of the department's political leadership, not to mention that leadership's 'policy concerns.' That respect is a vital thing, as fragile as it is essential, and now it's gone."


UPDATE: ABU GONZALES TAKES RESPONSIBILITY-- BUT NOT THE KIND WITH CONSEQUENCES OF COURSE

Gonzales wrote an ingenuous, maudlin and simpering OpEd in tomorrow's Washington Post pleading to keep his job, a job already promised to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.