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Friday, March 13, 2009
Courts - "How Obama Will Handle U.S. Attorney Posts Still Unclear"
The Washington Post this morning has this story by Carrie Johnson that begins:
One of the better spoils of winning the presidency is the power to appoint nearly 100 top prosecutors across the country. But filling the plum jobs has become a test of competing priorities for President Obama. While he pledged bipartisanship during his campaign, replacing the cadre of mostly conservative U.S. attorneys would signal a new direction.When President Bill Clinton took office, he fired all U.S. attorneys at once, provoking intense criticism in the conservative legal community and among career lawyers at the Justice Department.
President George W. Bush took a different approach, slowly releasing several of the prosecutors but keeping in place Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, while she pursued terrorism cases and a politically sensitive investigation of Clinton's pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.
Obama has not made clear how he will build his own corps of prosecutors, a group that shapes an administration's approach to law enforcement and is critical to its smooth operation. U.S. attorneys' offices handled more than 100,000 criminal cases and recovered $1.3 billion in forfeited cash and property in the past fiscal year, according to a prosecutors' trade group.
The White House is under pressure from several fronts, both to appoint new prosecutors favored by members of Congress and, in other cases, to keep some U.S. attorneys from the Bush administration.
Several Bush holdovers, who were told before the inauguration that they could stay "for the time being," are making it known that they want to remain, citing the high-profile investigations they are pursuing. About 40 of the Bush appointees left of their own accord before the election, but dozens have stayed on.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 13, 2009 09:47 AM
Posted to Courts in general