The Devotee

While the focus is on Alberto Gonzales, closer to home is the story of Mary Beth Buchanan, US Attorney for the Western District of PA. According to Talking Points Memo, she is on a list of US Attorneys that Rep. Conyers (D-MI) wants to talk to:

The Justice Department consulted with U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan in Pittsburgh when it was drawing up a list of prosecutors to be fired, a former top aide to the attorney general told investigators, and now a House committee wants to interview her.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, told Senate investigators Sunday that Buchanan was one of the senior officials he consulted about which U.S. attorneys should be asked to resign. . . . At the time she was consulted, Buchanan was also serving as director of an office that provides administrative support to U.S. attorneys -- a job she had from June 2004 until June 2005.

See, Ex-AG Aide Says Buchanan Consulted On Firings.

So who is Mary Beth Buchanan? As the Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports, No trouble for Buchanan to stay in line:

While the firing of eight U.S. attorneys across the country has focused attention on those who didn't get with the administration's program, Ms. Buchanan has proved herself to be a perfect fit.

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When first taking office, she quickly attached herself to Mr. Ashcroft and his policies -- even helping to promote the controversial USA Patriot Act in newspapers and community forums.

She earned national headlines for her prosecution of Tommy Chong, of Cheech and Chong fame, as part of Operation Pipe Dreams, in which federal prosecutors targeted head shops.

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Those drug paraphernalia cases -- like the sale of obscenity online -- could have been tried anywhere in the country because the Internet was used. But they landed in Ms. Buchanan's office.

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Paul Brysh, a career federal prosecutor who retired from Ms. Buchanan's staff in 2004, said there was some criticism of Ms. Buchanan's decision to try both the Chong and obscenity cases, noting that they may not be the best use of scarce federal prosecutorial resources.

"The Department of Justice sets priorities and goals," Mr. Brysh said. "Certainly, in the case of Mary Beth, the department wanted to emphasize obscenity prosecutions, and she followed the policy."

A shining example of the "loyal Bushie," Buchanan knew exactly how to please her bosses. See also, The Face of a "Loyal Bushie". As the Post Gazette noted:

Aside from those high-profile cases, Ms. Buchanan has put a special emphasis on public corruption during her tenure.

In the last two years, her office has successfully prosecuted four ranking members of the Allegheny County sheriff's office, including the former sheriff.

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All of the public officials she has targeted have been Democrats, in part, of course, because most officeholders in Allegheny County are Democrats.

But allegations of wrongdoing have also come up against some Republicans here over the years. Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum was heavily criticized for saying that his family lived in Penn Hills -- requiring the school district there to pay the cost for his children to attend a cyber school -- while they were really in Virginia.

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A recently released study by two retired communication professors found that under the Bush administration, the Department of Justice has investigated elected Democratic officeholders and office seekers locally seven times more than their Republican counterparts.

The authors looked at 375 federal criminal cases across the country that targeted public officials from 2001 to 2006.

They found that of those, 298 defendants were Democrats; 67 were Republicans and 10 were independents.

That number comes despite a statistic that shows that Democratic officeholders outnumber Republicans nationally by only 50 percent to 41 percent, said one of the authors, Donald C. Shields, a professor emeritus of communication at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.

"Pittsburgh's a big town, but you have a hundred little towns," Mr. Shields said. "It shouldn't be hard [to find a Republican] if they're investigating fairly. They didn't just swear to uphold the law where Democrats hold office."

The maxim "the perception become the reality" is the biggest problem for Buchanan. Respect for the law is inextricably tied to the view that the law is being fairly applied. Of course this is true in all cases, but it is especially so with criminal prosecutions, since individual's liberty (and perhaps even life) is at stake.

Former US Attorney Thomas Farrell wrote an impassioned op-ed, Our U.S. attorney should resign -- Mary Beth Buchanan has pursued the partisan priorities of the Bush administration -- describing this loss of trust:

The Bush administration's efforts to use an obscure provision of the Patriot Act to replace U.S. attorneys it deemed too vigorous in investigating Republican officials, too slow in indicting Democratic public officials or too reluctant to investigate "voter fraud" -- a euphemism for attempting to suppress the minority vote -- caused me to re-think my opinion of the fairness of Western Pennsylvania's U.S. attorney, Mary Beth Buchanan. I began to wonder why all of the recent public-corruption investigations in our region have been of Democrats.

The Bush administration has politicized the Department of Justice, just as it has every federal agency. The solicitor general used to be known as "the 10th justice" for his presumed fairness and independence in presenting arguments to the Supreme Court; the current solicitor general is just a mouthpiece for the administration's far-right ideology. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his subordinates have disgraced their offices with the positions they've taken to justify torture and the administration's evasion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's restrictions, loose as they are, on wiretaps.

Ms. Buchanan has been a devotee of the administration's policies. She has aided the effort to inflate the law-enforcement successes in the war on terror by misclassifying routine immigration and false-document cases as "anti-terrorism cases." For a time, the Western Pennsylvania District topped the nation in the number of "anti-terrorism" prosecutions, largely because dozens of Iraqi immigrant truck-drivers were prosecuted for paying off a motor-vehicles official to obtain commercial-drivers licenses. All of them did it to get work; none had terroristic intentions; all received sentences of probation.

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I've tried to defend Ms. Buchanan's choice of targets, but no more. Democrats do occupy most public offices in Allegheny County, but are the Republican officials in the 24 other counties of the Western Pennsylvania District all squeaky clean? Why apparently no investigation into Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy's use of government office staff to support his campaign -- which is not unlike what happened in the Allegheny County sheriff's office? Ms. Buchanan also left to local authorities the prosecution of Republican state Rep. Jeff Habay after similar accusations arose.

And what of ex-U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, Ms. Buchanan's political sponsor? He misrepresented his family's residency in order to obtain state-funded cyber schooling for his children. Yet there appears to have been no investigation. I fear the worst.

Ms. Buchanan has been unique among her predecessors in the extent to which she has looked to Washington for direction and political advancement. I no longer have faith that she can remain independent of the administration's partisanship. Her continued leadership casts a cloud over the public corruption investigations and prosecutions now pending in her office.

This is the worst fallout from Attorneygate, in my opinion. With any political investigation or prosecution, there is always the concern that the case is politically motivated. The conduct of Gonzales -- and Buchanan -- have raised that specter to a reality, in at least some cases. Unfortunately, all cases against political are now open to question.

Here in Philly, the recent indictment of Vince Fumo, see Payback's Bitch, is now open to question by a claim that it was just a politicized federal investigation, Will a national scandal hit Philly, and help Vince Fumo? and will be used as a defense against the charges. See, The Liberal Doomsayer.

UPDATE (4/23): More on Mary Beth Buchanan. Apparently, she put her "home boy" in as US Attorney in Alaska, U.S. scandal threatens Alaska’s prosecutor, without even consulting the state's two Republican senators (including Senator Ted "NO" Stevens).

Tags: Law, News, Politics, Attorneygate