Attorney General Michael Mukasey dove right into the sensitive topic of the politicization of the Justice Department in his speech to the American Bar Association this morning in New York.
"I would like to talk to you today about a topic that I'm sure is of mutual interest," Mukasey began. "[N]amely, professionalism at the United States Department of Justice."
Calling the findings of the two recent reports by the DOJ Inspector General on politicization in the Justice Department "disturbing," Mukasey bemoaned the system for failing to stop the "active wrong-doing."
I want to stress that last point because there is no denying it: the system failed. The active wrong-doing detailed in the two joint reports was not systemic in that only a few people were directly implicated in it. But the failure was systemic in that the system - the institution - failed to check the behavior of those who did wrong. There was a failure of supervision by senior officials in the Department. And there was a failure on the part of some employees to cry foul when they were aware, or should have been aware, of problems.
Mukasey went on to describe the changes to the Justice Department and responded to critics complaints that those named in the OIG reports have suffered no consequences.
"Far from it," Mukasey said. "The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the Department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity. Their misconduct has now been laid bare by the Justice Department for all to see. . .To put it in concrete terms, I doubt that anyone in this room would want to trade places with any of those people."
Previously, there have been legislative requests to dismiss those hired at the DOJ during this politicized period -- an idea Mukasey called "unfair" today:
Other critics have suggested that we should summarily fire or reassign all those people who were hired through the flawed processes described in the joint reports. But there is a principle of equity that we all learned in the schoolyard, and that remains as true today as when we first heard it: two wrongs do not make a right. As the Inspector General himself recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee, the people hired in an improper way did not, themselves, do anything wrong. It therefore would be unfair - and quite possibly illegal given their civil service protections - to fire them or to reassign them without individual cause.
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