DoJ to Feinstein: Nanny Nanny Boo Boo“How many United States attorneys have been asked to resign in the past year?” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked Alberto Gonzales during a January 18th Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Eight months later, she’s still asking.
Her latest answer from the Justice Department? We already told you. “We believe that information responsive to Senator Feinstein’s question was provided to the Committee in the course of the staff’s confidential, transcribed interviews of Department officials,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski wrote to Feinstein in a letter last week.
But if her question was answered, Sen. Feinstein must have missed it. The Justice Department’s reply is “wholly unsatisfactory,” Feinstein says.
The letter was a follow-up to Feinstein’s questions to Gonzales during a hearing last month. When Feinstein asked then whether Gonzales had fired more than the nine U.S. attorneys that are publicly known, Gonzales said, maybe:
“Senator, there may have been others. I would be happy to get back to you with that kind of information about who has left. But I don’t know the answer to your question. But I can certainly find out.”
And the Justice Department still won’t simply tell her how many U.S. attorneys have been fired.
As always, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey provided a stark contrast to the current Department leadership when he testified before Congress in May. Comey freely offered that he’d fired two U.S. attorneys during his tenure — and then went on to candidly discuss the reasons as much as he could in an open setting. He made it seem so easy.
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