Jennifer Rubin talks to former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who expresses disappointment in the politicization of the Justice Department under Eric Holder:
This does revive the theme of “politicization,” an accusation hurled at the Bush administration before Mukasey’s November 2007 arrival at the Justice Department. Mukasey makes a key distinction: “The president runs on policies and has the right to set them. There is a lighter hand for the Justice Department because here there is an obligation to enforce the law.” That said, he cautions, there is no place for political interference in specific cases. Under his tenure, he strictly limited White House contact with Justice Department lawyers. “There was no calling from the administration to argue about individual cases.”
This criticism has merit -- there's no reason Rahm Emanuel should have been pressuring Holder where and how to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed based on the White House's political interests, and there's no reason the president should be telling the attorney general when it's time to "look forward" and avoid prosecuting people who may have committed crimes. In the latter case, though, Mukasey attacks Holder for investigating those interrogators who may have gone beyond what was legally authorized by the Bush Justice Department, which suggests an interesting view of "politicization." Mukasey seems angry that Holder should didn't realize that he was supposed to ignore violations of the law when committed by officials of the U.S. government in the name of national security. Mukasey's remarks seem particularly ill-timed given that the ACLU has just released documents that they say "involve circumstances or allegations of unjustified homicide" in 25 to 30 cases.
There's something amusing, though, about Mukasey and Rubin suggesting that Holder's overall tenure is more heavily politicized than the prior administration. The Bush White House never interfered with "individual cases," except for that time they started firing U.S. attorneys for not going after designated political targets with trumped-up allegations. The ensuing investigation led to the departure of nine high-level Justice Department officials including Mukasey's predecessor Alberto Gonzales, and revealed that DoJ had completely politicized the hiring process by placing partisan loyalty above applicants' actual qualifications. You don't need the White House to "politicize" the Justice Department if you appoint leadership who only hire people who see party loyalty as more important than upholding the law. Nothing Holder has done is remotely comparable to all this.
But Mukasey knows all that, because that's how he got his job. It's not like everything that happened in the Bush Justice Department before 2007 no longer counts, because Mukasey put a stop to it. The point of pieces like these is to pretend the above never happened, as though anyone could forget the image of Gonzales feigning amnesia in front of Congress for hours at a time.
