White House Hopefuls Position Themselves on the Justice Department Controversy
March 16, 2007 — -- Across the 2008 campaign landscape, presidential hopefuls wasted no time responding to the U.S. attorneys controversy. Some called for the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales while others waited out the storm to see what direction the political winds would blow.
Thursday's news cycle wove White House adviser Karl Rove into the fray when e-mails surfaced that heightened Rove's role in the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors. Moreover, the January 2005 correspondence revealed Rove as the brains behind the more dramatic idea of replacing all 93 U.S. attorneys after the president's 2004 re-election.
Rove Reacts
At an address to journalism students at Alabama's Troy University yesterday, Rove described the attorney firings as a mixture of personnel and policy.
Rove cited the Clinton administration's decision to replace 123 U.S. attorneys during his time in office (Bush has replaced 128 in the last six years), including the 93 who were replaced at the beginning of Clinton's administration. Rove wondered why those pointing their fingers at Gonzales now didn't have the same reaction then.
Rove called the situation "a lot of politics" and asked "the American people and Congress to look fairly and carefully at what's being said and done now."
Democratic Front-Runners Call for Gonzales' Resignation
Not surprisingly the Democratic contenders called for Gonzales' resignation in no uncertain terms.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News' Jake Tapper on Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., said, "The buck should stop somewhere, and the attorney general -- who still seems to confuse his prior role as the president's personal attorney with his duty to the system of justice and to the entire country -- should resign."
Addressing her husband's replacement of U.S. attorneys when he took office in 1993, Clinton said: "There is a great difference. When a new president comes in, a new president gets to clean house. It's not done on a case-by-case basis where you didn't do what some senator or member of Congress told you to do in terms of investigations into your opponents. It is 'Let's start afresh' and every president has done that."
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