U.S. Government

Things are looking grimmer and grimmer for U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales these days. The scandal involving the firing of 8 U.S. attorneys has led to accusations that Gonzales runs the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) to suit the Bush Administration's right wing political ideology instead of to protect the interest of U.S. citizens. Now Sharon Eubanks, the lead attorney in DOJ's racketeering case against the major American tobacco companies, has emerged from her silence and confirmed suspicions of the extent to which politics is running DOJ instead of public interest. Eubanks told the [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/21/AR2007032102713.html Washington Post] that Bush administration political appointees within DOJ repeatedly ordered her to take steps to weaken the government's case against the industry. Eubanks says she was ordered to tell key witnesses change their testimony, was forced to ditch her own closing remarks and made to read closing arguments that her superiors had written for her, and that the DOJ team was told to greatly scale back its requests for remedies against the tobacco companies. Of course, high-ranking Justice Department officials claimed at the time that there was no political meddling in the case, but tobacco control people following the case knew differently. Now Ms. Eubanks has confirmed what we knew all along.

Guest poster: Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation:

The controversy around the firing of several U.S. attorneys in December has dominated the news coming out of Congress this week and Congresspedia’s staff and citizen editors have been busy tracking developments on our thorough page on the subject. Of central importance to the controversy is the issue of why those eight particular U.S. attorneys were fired. I’ve been looking into the analyses of the documents released by the Justice Department, and they show that the attorneys were at least partially judged by their willingness to toe-the-line — or, as one internal administration document put it, to be good “Bushies” — and were deemed expendable if they moved too far from administration priorities. In the case of some of the fired attorneys, it appears that the offense committed may have been their investigations into Republican officials, including members of Congress, in the lead-up to the 2006 congressional elections.

Here is a look at four of the attorneys at issue and their respective corruption investigations: