Bush apologists fighting uphill battle on US Attorney firings

By Lee Russ

Friday, March 23, 2007 at 03:03 PM

The Bush apologist network is in fine voice over the US Attorney firings. Half of the proud corps of propagandists" (PCP) jumps up and down screaming Clinton fired all the US Attorneys, while the other half of the PCP has formed an echo chamber which keeps repeating "it was about immigration prosecutions, it was about immigration prosecutions, it was about immigration prosecutions."

The Clinton excuse is just that: an excuse, and one that is deliberately misleading, as most sane people now understand. Clinton fired them as he became president, just as almost every other president has done upon taking office, including Bush, his daddy, and Reagan. There is a DOJ memo now available to the public which admits that George W. Bush fired all Clinton's US Attorneys when he took office, with every last one of them being "gone by late April" of 2001.

The "it was about immigration prosecutions" echo chamber is trying to spin the idea that Bush was beset by intra-Republican strife over immigration, with many prominent Republican legislators screaming in the Bush ear that US Attorneys in border states weren't prosecuting enough illegal immigration cases. According to the echo chamber, this is why Carol Lam and and two other border state Attorneys (Iglesias and Charlton) were fired.

But this is likely to come back and bite them in the butt. It will be a pretty simple task to compare the illegal immigration prosecution record of these 3 fired Attorneys to the same record for the border state Attorneys who were not fired. And I think we're going to find that the records of the fired attorneys weren't significantly different than the record of the non-fired Attorneys. In fact, Fox News, a prominent component of the echo chamber, already has a news story about how "Guidelines issued by U.S. attorneys in Texas showed that most illegal immigrants crossing into the state had to be arrested at least six times before federal authorities would prosecute them, according to an internal Justice Department memo." The reason? We don't have nearly enough jail space to arrest and imprison every illegal immigrant we catch. Yet neither of the two Texas US Attorneys was fired.

And then, of course, the echo chamber still needs to deal with those phone calls to Iglesias, by the Republican Senator and the Republican Congresswoman, about whether he was going to file corruption charges against Democrats before the 2006 election.....