The Fall of Pete Domenici: Just the Beginning?

It looks as if the U.S. Attorney probe scandal has claimed its first major victim: Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico. He's got some serious 'splainin' to do, and so far he's not doing it very well.

Matthew Miller of the DSCC puts it clearly:

GOP Senator Pete Domenici just can't get his story straight. When news first broke that he called U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to pressure him about ongoing investigations, Domenici said he had no idea what Iglesias was talking about. Then when it became clear that Iglesias would testify before Congressional committees, Domenici reversed course and admitted to the conversation. And now ... Domenici says he simply cannot "recall my mentioning the November election to him."

"It's getting harder and harder to keep track of Pete Domenici's denials, since he comes up with a different version every day," said DSCC spokesman Matthew Miller. "By tomorrow Pete Domenici won't remember having ever met David Iglesias or even knowing what the U.S. Attorney does. But Domenici's denials have now been contradicted in sworn testimony by a respected former U.S. Attorney who was fired just weeks after he refused to bow to Domenici's inappropriate and possibly illegal pressure. Pete Domenici is facing a Senate ethics investigation and a possible obstruction of justice review - he needs to start coming clean about his exact role in this growing scandal."

With the Senate Ethics Committee breathing down his neck, Domenici has hired a top-gun criminal defense lawyer, Lee Blalack of & Myers. The fate of Blalack's previous congressional client, Duke Cunningham (now enjoying an eight-year all-expenses vacation in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons) is hardly a good omen for Domenici, and his choice of Blalack suggests that Domenici is aware how deep a hole he's dug for himself.

Domenici's phone call to David Iglesias, in what Iglesias thought was an attempt to apply pressure for pre-election indictments in a local corruption case involving New Mexico Democrats, pretty clearly ran afoul of Senate ethics rules, if we believe Iglesias's version of the phone call rather than one of the three versions Domenici has offered so far. It might, if the statute were read literally, even expose Domenici to charges of obstruction of justice, though no one so far seems to have come up with a precedent in which obstruction charges were brought for trying to speed an investigation up rather than trying to shut one down.

But as a threat to republican government, the use of prosecution to punish the political enemies of those currently in power is at least as troubling as the use of political pressure to protect their friends. And Iglesias wasn't the only U.S. Attorney apparently bounced for paying more attention to professional ethics than to Republican pressure; John McKay in Washington seems to have lost not only his post as U.S. Attorney but a nomination to be a federal judge because he resisted Congressional pressure (ironically but not surprisingly, from "Doc" Hastings, top Republican on the House Ethics Committee) to bring vote fraud indictments in a tightly contested race for Governor.

As Paul Krugman points out, we know about the cases where pressure failed; in how many cases did it succeed? Just why, for example, did the U.S. Attorney's office for New Jersey do so much leaking hostile to Sen. Bob Menendez just before last fall's elections, where his Republican opponent made corruption a central issue?

Bonnie Erbe of Scripps-Howard put it bluntly in a column published on the U.S. News blog:

The emerging scandal surrounding the dismissals of eight former U.S. attorneys should signify to American voters the depth, breadth, and permeation of corruption in the Bush administration.

When a U.S. senator (to wit, Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican) feels free to call a prosecutor at home and hang up on him for resisting political pressure in the course of executing his prosecutorial duties, the line between politics and law enforcement has been so thoroughly violated that it no longer exists.

[snip]

What's going on in Washington is not sufficiently removed from the routine doings of a tawdry Third World dictatorship to give any American comfort.

Will the Senate Ethics Committee take the rare step of recommending Domenici's expulsion? Even if it does, will enough of Domenici's GOP colleagues agree to make up the two-thirds majority needed to expel? I wouldn't bet on it. And there seems no reasonable hope that Domenici will do the decent thing and resign.

But whatever time Domenici spends the next year defending himself, and raising money to defend himself, he can't spend on a re-election campaign. He might well decide to retire. If he did, the Democrats would have a very good shot at his seat. His House colleague Heather Wilson, who tried to muscle Iglesias on the same case, will face an equally hard challenge in holding on to her seat.

Nor are they alone in facing serious trouble. Arlen Specter broadly hinted that the scandal, which both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees continue to investigate, may cost Attorney General Alberto Gonzales his job as well, "sooner rather than later."

At the very least, the Presidential power grab that Specter (or, he says, one of his staffers acting without his knowledge at the behest of the Justice Department) managed to sneak into the Patriot Act reauthorization late last year now seems certain to be reversed; Gonzales agreed not to oppose legislation reinstating the limit on how long a replacement U.S. Attorney can serve without Senate confirmation. That change, which would have made the U.S. Attorneys effectively, as well as nominally, at-will Presidential appointees, would have represented a major change in the Constitution-in-practice, making every citizen vulnerable to prosecution at the whim of the same White House political operation (the people John DiIulio called "the Mayberry Machiavellis") that has made every other function of government entirely subordinate to partisan politics.

For a story barely three months old, and that has yet to appear on the ABC or NBC nightly news shows (and only twice on CBS, both within the last week), and which has been driving largely by the reporting of Talking Points Memo and of the McClatchey news chain, rather than the national daily newspapers, the newsmagazines, or the wire services, the U.S. Attorney purge has already assumed giant proportions. Right now, the smart-money bet is that when the history of the maladministration of King George the Forty-Third is written, the chapter on Carol Lam and David Iglesias will be longer than the chapter on Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame.