Bruce Fein was a Justice Department official during the Reagan administration. He talks with NPR's John Ydstie about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys.
Should he stay or go and why?
Well, I think he should go. The Justice Department has a unique position in the Cabinet: It's the steward of the rule of law. And the rule of law, like Caesar's wife, must be above suspicion.
And the attorney general has given what I might call a dynamic rather than a static interpretation of what happened with regard to the firing of these seven or eight U.S. attorneys. He's changed his story from time to time.
And he's said at one point that he didn't even know what his chief of staff was going with regard to this essential function of his: namely superintending and determining whether the U.S. attorneys were adequately performing their jobs, and whether they required removal because of some misconduct or disobedience to the priorities they were supposed to be pursuing.
But that isn't in isolation. This comes at a time when the attorney general has also agreed he was negligent in not knowing what the FBI was doing with regard to the issuance of national security letters.
And when you lose the trust of Congress and the American people, I think that your ability to be the model for the Justice Department has been totally discredited and requires a resignation.
But doesn't the president have the right to retain a loyal Cabinet secretary unless that person has clearly violated the law?
It's surely true that the president has a right to insist on choosing his Cabinet officials. So as a matter of raw power, sure, what Gonzales has done does not yet amount to a high crime and misdemeanor, justifying impeachment. But if the standard for retaining people in the Justice Department (is to be) where anything less than criminality justifies your staying, we soon would have a discredited and tarnished view of the rule of law. The Attorney General has to have a higher standard ... and that standard has not been met.
What about Bush's support? Doesn't that mean he's more likely to stay on?
I don't think it's the president's support that's going to be decisive here. In the same way that he initially supported Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court, it was really the disenchantment of the public and later, Congress, that caused her to withdraw her name. I think the same will be at work with Mr. Gonzales.
If Gonzales were to leave, who would you see as a likely replacement? Can the president hope to find someone as loyal and like-minded as Gonzales? Or do the circumstances dictate someone more independent?
I think it's the latter. If I can draw some analogy historically, I was around in the Nixon administration. When he then left office, he had two attorneys general, John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst, who were convicted of crimes. Elliot Richardson quit and Bill Ruckelshaus quit as attorney general because they wouldn't fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate prosecutor.
And in the aftermath, when President Ford came in, he ultimately chose Bill Saxbe, but then Edward Levi was chosen to come in and serve as attorney general. And Ed was someone of great independent stature from the University of Chicago, and he restored, I think, trust and confidence and respect for the department.
And I would think someone like an Ed Levi figure is the one who would most likely succeed an Alberto Gonzales.
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