Having been caught firing competent U.S. attorneys because they were insufficiently obedient, or because they were in the way of a favor somebody owed an up-and-coming young lawyer, the Department of Justice offers not only excuses, but really stupid excuses:
At the time, none of the attorneys was given any reason for his dismissal. When Democrats in Congress began to make a political issue of the firings, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty responded with an explanation that only made things worse, appearing to question the competence of the prosecutors by calling their firings “performance-related.”
McNulty’s assessment, delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee in February, was contradicted by the Justice Department’s own internal evaluations of the prosecutors — and a chorus of praise by judges and other officials in law enforcement.
That left [Senior DoJ official William] Moschella with some explaining to do.
And explain away he did, trying to clarify McNulty’s charge by saying that what had been broadly stated as performance issues actually included “policy, priorities, and management.”
In other words, when he said that the U.S. attorneys had been let go because they just weren’t doing their jobs, what he in fact meant was that they had policies and priorities that put competence well behind “policy”. Nice.
mythago
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