“The first round of subpoenas concern the recent controversial firings by the Bush administration of seven U.S. attorneys, some of whom were pursuing public corruption cases against Republican members of Congress.” Now, folks, I haven’t talked about this. I have been meaning to but it hasn’t risen to the top of any stack. It’s sort of not been on the radar, but this is much ado about nothing. US attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States. People have forgotten that when Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993, one of the first things he did was to fire every US attorney and replace them with his own. You won’t find that in any of these news stories. Now you will find stories trying to come up with some corruption case here: the Bush administration getting rid of these US attorneys because they’re trying to cover corruption! The cases will go forward with the new US attorneys. The cases don’t die when the attorneys go away. US attorneys change all the time.
Bill Clinton got rid of every US attorney that was in office. George W. Bush did not. George Bush left a lot of Clinton’s US attorneys. Just like he left a lot of Clinton plants in the CIA, Clinton plants at state, Clinton plants at the Pentagon. It was all part of the new tone, I guess — trying to promote unity and good vibes and “can’t we all get along,” and this sort of stuff. The number of US attorneys that Bush has gotten rid of pale in comparison to what Bill Clinton did. This is 2007. In 2006 there was a Democrat US attorney in the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, which is one of the largest US attorney offices in the country. Bush left a protege of Chuck Schumer in that office until a guy named Mike Garcia was appointed to replace him, after five or six years of the Bush administration. Nobody said anything about that when it happened. But now they’re trying to raise hell over these seven or eight US attorneys — and that’s what the subpoenas are for, the first round. So keep a sharp eye.