U.S. Attorneys, Reloaded

NYT Editorial

As the United States attorney scandal grows, so does the number of prosecutors who seem to have been pushed out for partisan political reasons. Another highly suspicious case has emerged in the appointment of Bradley Schlozman, a controversial elections lawyer, to replace a respected United States attorney in Missouri. From the facts available, it looks like a main reason for installing Mr. Schlozman was to help Republicans win a pivotal Missouri Senate race.

Jim Talent, the Republican incumbent, was facing a strong challenge from Claire McCaskill last year when the United States attorney, Todd Graves, resigned suddenly. Mr. Graves suspects that he may have been pushed out in part because he refused to support a baseless lawsuit against the state of Missouri that could have led to voters’ being wrongly removed from the rolls.

Mr. Graves was replaced by Mr. Schlozman, a high-level Justice Department lawyer who had made his name in the Bush administration by helping to turn the department away from its historic commitment to protecting the voting rights of minorities. Mr. Schlozman was one of the political appointees who approved Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting plan and Georgia’s voter ID law, over the objection of career lawyers on the staff, who insisted that both violated the Voting Rights Act. McClatchy Newspapers reported that Mr. Schlozman also has been accused of hiring Justice Department lawyers based on their political party.

Mr. Schlozman injected the United States attorney’s office directly into the Talent-McCaskill race. Days before the election, he announced indictments of four people who were registering voters for the liberal group Acorn on charges of submitting false registration forms. The Republicans turned the indictments into an issue in the campaign, although Ms. McCaskill won the election anyway. Congress should investigate whether the indictments violated Justice Department guidelines, which say that election crime investigations should not be conducted right before an election, because they can themselves become a campaign issue.

Mr. Schlozman’s short stint in Missouri — he left after about a year — appears to be another case of the Bush administration’s politicizing federal prosecutors’ offices. Mr. Graves was reportedly on a list to be fired, and clues are emerging about why. He said this week that when he interviewed for the job, he was asked to name one attribute that describes him. “I said independent,” he said. “Apparently, that was the wrong attribute.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee has asked to question Mr. Schlozman, and it should also question Mr. Graves. But Karl Rove and the former White House counsel Harriet Miers, who appear to have been deeply involved in the United States attorney firings, are likely to know the most about what happened, and should be made to testify as well.

A single Senate campaign may not seem that important. But Missouri’s race was among the nation’s closest, and if Mr. Talent had won, the Republicans would have kept their Senate majority. The American people have a right to know whether Mr. Schlozman was sent on his brief assignment in Missouri to pursue justice, or to affect the outcome of an election.