Today’s Must ReadAh, the lessons learned.
So. As we ready ourselves for the congressional hearings today, during which an already raging scandal will get a full airing, we hear from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who tells The Wall Street Journal what all this has taught him: “We could have rolled out the decisions more smoothly.”
Put this together with the “acknowledgment” by White House officials that “the administration mishandled the firings by not explaining more clearly to lawmakers that a large group was being terminated at once — which is unusual — and that the reason was the policy performance review,” and it’s clear that this scandal is nothing more than a PR failure, at least in the administration’s view.
But let’s gauge the PR failure moving into today’s hearings. Today, in just one morning of reporting, we find out from McClatchy that a Justice Department official threatened the U.S. attorneys that if they continued to talk about the circumstances of their firing, “previously undisclosed details about the reasons they were fired might be released”; The Washington Post reports that Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) has finally admitted that she called U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to question him about his office’s investigation of a state Democrat — though she risibly argues that she was trying to help Iglesias, not pressure him; The New York Times reports that another U.S. attorney says that he was run out of office for pursuing a corruption investigation of Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R); and the senior Justice official who, apparently reluctantly, made the actual calls to fire seven of the prosecutors, has resigned in the midst of the scandal, though he says his resignation is unrelated.
Yes, I’d say the decisions could have been rolled out more smoothly.