I Was Born Yesterday

by digby

I know that the cognoscenti think all this talk about politicization of the Justice Department is silly Claud Rainsing on the part of cynical Democratic partisans, but when you see things like this, you have to realize how ugly this US Attorney scandal really is:

Today, the nonpartisan congressional watchdog Democracy 21 sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty asking whether there had been political interference in the investigation and prosecution of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

I hadn’t even thought about that up to now — I guess I’m just another of those fools who believed that professional US Attorneys, even ambitious Republican ones, would neither risk their reputations nor the public’s faith in the rule of law by helping cover up the vast network of GOP corruption. It never occurred to me that the political arm of the Justice Department would have the balls to interfere in such high profile cases for fear of a revolt from the US Attorney’s themselves. I assumed that the wheels of justice moved slowly and that if they didn’t indict high profile political figures it was because the cases were too murky and would risk a very public failure.

Then came the firings and we find that throughout the country these Republican prosecutors have been targeting Democrats. (And we can speculate as Christy at FDL does here on the possible method to their madness.) I now realize that I honestly did not think that even this criminal administration would go so far as to allow Karl Rove to have a hand in the Justice department and I never considered that US Attorney’s were doing his bidding.

Why I was so naive, I do not know. Tom Delay, after all, is still free. I guess I still thought that there were certain limits, even for this administration.

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