Eric Holder, Will You Clean Up DOJ and Oust Tainted Bush Prosecutorgate Attorneys and Immigration Judges?

Senate conservatives stalled for two months before approving Obama's choice of Attorney General Eric Holder. Now that he's in office, will President Obama's AG systematically clean up the deeply politicized, dysfunctional, DOJ disaster that John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and Michael Hayden left to him?

It won't be easy, even if Holder turns out to be a crusader for justice -- which is not yet clear at this early date. Still, one can hope. Of course, the torture accountability issue is now on the front burner, largely because new torture memos came out of hiding (were declassified) last week. Keeping it in the news is the fact that, very soon, the Justice Department's own Office of Professional Responsibility will release a year-long report examining the role of DOJ people in green-lighting torture. The LA Times indicates the upcoming OPR report might lead to charges of conspiracy to commit a range of felonies, including torture. But the Yoo/Bybee/Bradbury/Bush/Cheney torture story is not Holder's only problem to sort out.

The bigger problem is that Holder's own department was tainted through and through by White House interference and control during the Bush Administration. People like Monica Goodling stuffed the DOJ with right-leaning ideologues who are still meting out "justice." Then, too, the DOJ purged itself of unbiased US Attorneys, retaining, presumably, only the ones who could be depended upon to share the Bush White House's priorities -- things like looking for "voter fraud" in big Democratic cities, or hunting down "illegals."

Yep, Holder is left holding a rusted-out old can of wiggly worms all right. The lid is off, too.

While trying to prosecute all kinds of crime across the country -- bank fraud, election theft, corruption, would be parts of the job -- Holder has lots of cleaning up to do right inside the Justice Department. But "The Party of No" (formerly the party of "Why Not?") isn't making it easy. Just because Bush is out to pasture doesn't mean others in the GOP have rolled over and played dead. The GOP is working feverishly in the media and in the corridors of Congress to block attorneys who stood against Bush era practices like domestic spying and torture. Dawn Johnsen is one of those, and her nomination to head the Office of Legal Counsel is threatened in part because she organized 19 former DOJ staffers to oppose the improper firing of US attorneys.

We must not forget that the shameful Prosecutorgate scandal that led to Alberto Gonzales' departure was not just about the top-level DOJ jobs. As Jamie Gorelick explained in a July 29, 2008 Washington Post piece: The DOJ hiring scandal spilled over to immigration judges, line prosecutors, career legal wonks ... pretty much everybody. Promotions and hirings and firings at all levels were the business of ill-qualified politcal hacks.

One DOJ conservative idealogue who needs to be dumped immediately is Leura Canary, the US Attorney in Alabama who prosecuted and jailed Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman. (He's out and mounting an appeal now.) Thom Hartmann urged listeners to his April 21 radio show to call Eric Holder's office at 202-514-2001 and politely urge him to replace her. 

Holder's long record in the Justice Department and his remarks in a recent speech suggest he has good instincts, so polite nudges from regular Americans might actually help. An attorney and player in the Alabama case, however, fears that Holder could be listening to the wrong advice:

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