Here's something I couldn't help but notice…
NEW YORK — Former Justice Department officials will not face prosecution for letting improper political considerations drive hirings of prosecutors, immigration judges and other career government lawyers, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said today. Mukasey used his sharpest words yet to criticize the senior leaders who took part in or failed to stop illegal hiring practices during the tenure of his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales.
But, he told delegates to the American Bar Association annual meeting, "not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws."
Did the Attorney General of the United States actually say, "…not…every violation of the law is a crime"? There's a sense in which that's true but it would have been a little more proper if he'd said, "Not every violation of the law is a prosecutable crime" or something to that effect. I mean, obviously it's not in the public's interest to prosecute every possible breach of any statute…but "violation of the law" is kind of the dictionary definition of the word "crime," isn't it?
I suspect what Mr. Mukasey actually meant was, "I was selected to make sure that there was as little prosecution as possible of Bush administration officials who break laws." Billions of dollars of our tax money that was supposed to go for the Iraq effort has instead gone into someone's pocket and that's probably not a crime now, either.
Remember the good ol' days when if a person in power (elected or appointed) had said something like that, he would have been called "soft on crime" and his resignation would have been demanded by most Republicans and even a lot of Democrats? A friend of mine said, back when it looked like Hillary Clinton might be our next president, "Five minutes after she's sworn in, the G.O.P. will demand a new Special Prosecutor to reopen the Filegate case."