Raw Story: Because Republican Senators chose loyalty to the president over the integrity of the US Justice Department, the ‘no-confidence vote against the attorney general was blocked by just seven votes. Presidential candidates Biden, Dodd, Obama, Brownback and McCain missed the vote, or it would have been four votes shy.

Neocon Joe Lieberman was the only non-Republican to join in the vote to cut off debate so a decision could be made. Previously, Lieberman’s split from the Dems has been about Iraq. This establishes a major new breaking point: he supports the Bush corruption of the Justice system to interfere with the nation’s voting processes, which has nothing at all to do with his opinions on national security.

I presume this means the residents of Connecticut support the Bush corruption schemes?

Now, consider some excerpts from an interview with a Justice Department official who resigned out of disgust for the way Gonzalez operated, courtesy of Cox News reporter Rebecca Carr:

WASHINGTON — Dan Metcalfe says he thought he had seen it all as a former senior Justice Department lawyer whose career stretches back to the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration.

Over the years, Metcalfe says, he has taken pride in being able to work with Republican and Democratic administrations as director of the department’s Office of Information and Privacy, which he co-founded in 1981.

But he says he has never seen anything quite like Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Metcalfe, 55, retired in early January, just before the storm erupted over the dismissal last year of nine U.S. attorneys. The House and Senate Judiciary committees are investigating whether the prosecutors were fired in order to squelch political investigations against Republicans or failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud charges against Democratic-leaning groups.

From Metcalfe’s interview:

Q.: You worked for both Republican and Democratic presidents since your start at the Justice Department in 1971. Can you tell the public why you left the Justice Department? Did it have something to do with the current politicization of the department?

A.: First of all, I must say that 55 is not far too young an age at which to retire from government service if one is interested in having a second career, such as teaching law. One of the advantages of my having started out so young and becoming an office director before age 30 was having had a full career, at a high level, by that minimum federal retirement age. That said, though, there’s no doubt that I would not have taken advantage of this so soon had I been working at age 55 in a different presidential administration.

Simply put, I found it increasingly difficult to look my wife and kids in the eye and say that even though I had a choice, I was going to continue working for George Bush and Alberto Gonzales. And this was before they and the public were able to fully comprehend why that sentence included Gonzales.

In fact, until Gonzales arrived at the Justice Department in early 2005, Dick Huff (the co-founder of the Office of Information and Privacy) and I had planned to work there until 2007 and at least 2008, respectively, in order to set up the best possible transition for OIP. That changed in mid-2005, however, when a rash of new mid-level political appointees, woefully lacking in government experience, began making the same types of mistakes over and again.

Mind you, these were almost entirely process problems, not policy ones per se, but in the aggregate they set a pattern of government disdain by a whole cadre of such aides who all too often were permitted to run rampant by the Department’s senior leadership. It was almost comical at times, except that the work we were doing was serious. So Dick, who had long been retirement-eligible, retired much earlier than planned — and that suddenly freed me of my own personal commitment to stay well beyond the point of my own eligibility at the end of 2006.

Did this have something to do with the current “politicization” in the department? Of course it did. But the connection had everything to do with the processes of government decision-making and public administration rather than with matters of substantive policy.

When you see images of Kyle Sampson (Gonzales’s former chief of staff), Monica Goodling (Gonzales’s former counsel), and Mike Elston (chief of staff to the deputy attorney general) “handling” U.S. attorneys as they did, with virtually no adult supervision to compensate for their glaring lack of management experience, you get an idea of what Dick Huff and I saw, within our own policy realm, beginning when Gonzales arrived in February 2005, a year before I decided to retire.

Sheer political expediency, avoidance of individual responsibility, defensive personal aggrandizement, irresponsible “consensus” decision-making, disregard for long-standing practices and principles — it was all there, and it was tainted at most every turn by unprecedented White House involvement.

Q.: What do you think about the way Gonzales has handled the firing of nine U.S. attorneys last year? Were their rights under the 1974 Privacy Act violated by Justice Department officials airing their personnel files in open testimony and selective leaks?

A.: I think the way in which the firings themselves were handled was abominable, the way in which the ensuing controversy was handled was abysmal, and the way in which Gonzales has handled himself is absolutely appalling. As a long-term Justice Department official, I am embarrassed and increasingly incensed that he is still in there.

The U.S. attorneys who were fired surely deserved much better by any reasonable standard, regardless of the fact that they were appointees who served at the president’s pleasure.

Remember that though these firings took place mostly in December, the controversy was largely fueled by the department’s subsequent public pronouncements that they had been replaced for “performance” reasons. As several of them plaintively pointed out, this was highly stigmatizing, both for them personally and for the career professionals who worked for them in their districts. And it became only worse as aides such as Sampson and Elston flailed around to publicly justify their callous actions after the fact.

One has to wonder: What was the legal basis for the making of these reputation-damaging disclosures?

Though Gonzalez was spared the Senate’s official no-confidence ruling, Metcalfe says there’s another place where the majority has no confidence in the AG: within the Justice Department.

Q.: Do you think that Gonzales has the confidence of the career civil servants to continue? How has the controversy affected the morale within the department?

A.: To put it mildly, it’s hard to imagine that anyone but the most die-hard political appointees at the Justice Department would have any confidence in Gonzales today — and even that small amount of support would be based on blind loyalty rather than painful reality.

To take just one very specific aspect of his “performance,” his astonishing lack of memory alone indicts him. It was bad enough when he claimed he couldn’t remember having had a conversation with President Bush about a U.S. attorney that even the White House (uncharacteristically) acknowledged had in fact taken place. But when he swore before the Senate in mid-April that he could not remember attending the Nov. 27 “U.S. attorney firing” meeting that was the only such meeting held — well, that was either non-credible or, if true, incredibly sad.

Remember that Gonzales had earlier testified on this subject on Jan. 18, less than two months after that Nov. 27 meeting; one should be able to assume that he specifically reviewed the basic facts of the matter then, scant as they were, regardless of how busy or distracted he might have been at any other time.

Yet it seemed that about all he could remember on the day of his Senate testimony in April was to show up as scheduled and take a seat — which, by the way, appears to have been Bush’s low standard for his own blind vote of “confidence.”

What a disgrace to the position of attorney general to have one who has become an iconic antithesis of personal responsibility. As for morale within the Department, perhaps someone should take an “exit poll” of its career employees as they leave the building at the end of the day; do you think Gonzales would muster even a fraction of Bush’s own approval rating of 28 percent?

Q.: Did the Justice Department decision-making processes that you saw in 2005 and 2006 fit with what we now know about Gonzales’ role in the U.S. attorneys matter?

A.: Yes, it was a perfect predictor of it. What I saw soon after Gonzales arrived was nothing less than a culture shift within the department, from one of individual responsibility to self-protection, from institutional integrity to highly transactional morality, and from professional confidence to fear of the unknown.

And make no mistake: The source of that fear almost invariably was “the White House” — which meant even the vice president’s office on down to the most junior of White House staff members.

And how does it compare to the corrupted Nixon Justice Department?

Q.: You were there during the Nixon years, including the infamous “Saturday night massacre.” Some lawmakers compare the current situation at Justice to that era, given the recent testimony by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey that mass resignations were in the works over Gonzales, as White House counsel, pursuing a domestic surveillance program that the Justice Department deemed illegal. Do you agree with that assessment?

A.: From my perspective, these current comparisons to the Watergate era are quite apt, even recognizing that the wide-ranging Watergate scandal involved many elements of proven criminality that do not appear to be present here.

It is the arrogance of power, the palpable disdain for the rule of law, and the utter disregard for the Justice Department’s integrity that brings this so very close to the Watergate era.

Yes, I was lucky enough to have been working as a law clerk in part of the attorney general’s office at the time of the “Saturday night massacre” in October of 1973, and I saw first-hand the devastating effects on the department’s morale and its functioning when Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus were forced to resign rather than do Nixon’s bidding and when William Saxbe came in as a replacement attorney general in 1974. That was a time characterized by virtually zero independence of the Justice Department from the White House and by fears of lawlessness as well. The rule of law was very much in question back then, as it unfortunately is again today.

And certainly the comparison is now all the more chilling with former Jim Comey’s vivid account of then-White House Counsel Gonzales’s blatant attempt to subvert the Justice Department’s legal authority in a darkened hospital room. My own view of that sorry episode is that it tellingly took nothing less than threatened resignations, rather than proper legal arguments, to back a president down from a wrongful path, and that the nation is very lucky to have had people of the caliber of Jim Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller to have done so.

You know, there were those who said in 1973 that our constitutional system of government had succeeded in withstanding a grave test when the Richardson and Ruckelshaus resignations permitted Nixon’s firing of (Watergate) Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox on that Saturday night, but I think the real success of Watergate was when Nixon ultimately lost in the courts, setting the stage for impeachment and removal. One wonders whether the comparison will continue to hold in that way.

If you read the rest, Metcalfe clearly assigns the blame to Gonzalez, Bush, Rove and Cheney’s office.