But Why Were They Fired?

The Bush administration keeps saying over and over that the US attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and that they could be fired for any reason. That's not really true. Firing them to impede an investigation is illegal. And constitutionally they cannot be fired for certain impermissible reasons (for example, he couldn't fire them based on their race).

Hence, in order to determine if the firings were legal and constitutional, we have to know why they were fired. So far, other than to say the firings were proper, the administration has not given any reason.

This is a bit incredible. Several weeks into this scandal, they have not given one decent explanation of why they decided to terminate these eight prosecutors. In the beginning, they said it was because of poor job performance. Then they backpedaled from that when that flimsy and untrue explanation got them in a lot of trouble. And since then, they have only cited "unspecified performance issues."

Well, they need to specify.

Alberto Gonzales was on a radio show in Seattle and they asked him four different times why the US attorney from Washington, John McKay was fired - and four times Gonzales dodged the question. Listen to his answers here.

Alberto Gonzales was part of an hour long meeting on November 27th where they devised a five prong strategy for firing these attorneys. So, why go through all the effort? Did they smell bad? Did they make a pass at Laura? Could Bush not find nicknames for them?

I put up a poll on AOL asking people to guess why Bush fired the US attorneys.

The administration even realized there could be political fallout from the dismissals. So, what was so important that they had to go through with the firings anyway?

After all these weeks, don't we deserve an answer as to why these decent, honorable public officials were unceremoniously fired? It's one thing to say they could fire them, it's another to tell us the reason for that decision. And they still haven't done that.

The Young Turks Podcast

Follow Cenk Uygur on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks