Alberto Gonzales ran a crooked Justice Department
July 28, 2008File this under the heading of news that isn’t really news: the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales routinely broke the law with illegal hiring practices. Forget the irony of the Justice Department breaking the law — the funny thing is that the worst that will happen is one lawyer will lose her license to practice law. While the crooks at the very top of the department get off without so much as a hand slap.
Monica Goodling is the lawyer in question. She is the one who has been singled out for illegally making political hiring decisions at Justice while serving Gonzales. Alberto gets plausible deniability — his fingerprints aren’t on these hiring decisions, only hers are. So she takes the fall even though the guy she worked for had to know something about what was happening in his Justice Department.
This administration has been a disaster for our democracy. The sooner the Bush era comes to a close, the better. And I don’t really care who replaces them — either McCain or Obama would bring in a better class of people than these self-righteous clowns in the Bush administration.