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March 13, 2007

Special Report Roundtable - March 13

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN CHARLES SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: The latest revelations prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there has been unprecedented breach of trust, abuse of power, and misuse of the Justice Department and that is serious and very important.

ALBERTO GONZALES, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: All political appointees can be removed by the president of the United States for any reason. I stand by the decision and I think it was the right decision.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: But what Alberta Gonzales is not standing by, tonight, is the matter -- the way the matter was handled in the aftermath of the firings of those eight U.S. attorneys. He acknowledged today that information was not properly communicated at the highest levels within the Justice Department, and for that reason, Justice Department witnesses went to Capitol Hill and didn't tell or have, even, the full story of how these eight U.S. attorneys come to be dismissed.

Some thoughts on all of this now from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call; and Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio FOX NEWS contributors, all. So what about this -- Fred.

FRED BARNES, WEEKLY STANDARD: Well, I call this a non-scandal scandal. It's barely a controversy, for the Justice Department to have handled this whole flap clumsily, is too bad, but it's not important. I think Senator Schumer was wrong on every count. This is not important. This is not serious. It is not an abuse of power. This is not misuse of the Justice Department. What was it last -- when it was not an unprecedented breach of trust. I don't remember, and I think he was in the house then, Senator Schumer jumping up and screaming and yelling and making all these wild claims when President Clinton fired all 93 U.S. attorneys right at the beginning of his administration in 1993.

HUME: Yeah, he finally decided not to fire one, and was Michael Chertoff who had some support from...

BARNES: Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. And look, in that case, Republicans complained about one instance that the U.S. attorney in the district might have been fired because he was investigating Dan Rostenkowski. As it turned out, that investigation went ahead. Rostenkowski was indicted, and pleaded, and he left Congress.

And there was no evidence that in the firing of these eight U.S. attorneys, now, that an investigation was stalled or stopped, or an indictment quashed -- this was just an exercise of presidential power, these are presidential appointees, eight of them were fired by the present.

MORT KONDRACKE, ROLL CALL: Well, in fact, back in 1991 when it Clinton did the firing -- or Janet Reno did the firing.

HUME: Ninety-three.

KONDRACKE: Ninety-three. Bob Dole, then Senate majority leader, said that this was a March massacre. It was denounced by Republicans at the time. But it was a lot of people being bounced all at the same time, and that was usually not done by precedent including Bush. Bush, when he came in, did not axe everybody who'd served in the previous administration. So, you know, he was observing the pattern of the past.

All of these people that he's firing, by the way, are his own appointees and as you pointed out, they do serve at the pleasure of the president. They are executive branch appointees and the Democrats have not really proved a single case of gross political motivation here. And in fact, if you talk to people in the administration, there is a good argument against some of these people not trying cases that the administration thought was important to try, like vote fraud in New Mexico. Iglesias, apparently ignored a very highly publicized case of an organization distributing voter registration forms to teenagers and illegal immigrants and that kind of stuff, and Iglesias didn't pursue it.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Look, the Democrats, if they haven't come up with evidence yet, they're going to keep on trying and that's what these hearings are for. Look, this is what switching majorities in Congress is about. It's about now, Democrats can have investigations like this. They can subpoena people, they're going to have Gonzales under oath, Leahy said. And they're going to see if they can build a case that shows that there was some kind of political motivation that these U.S. attorneys wouldn't...

HUME: No, no, no. They're not saying they're going to build a case. Schumer's already reached a conclusion.

LIASSON: Well, they said they don't have enough evidence for it. OK.

HUME: (INAUDIBLE)

LIASSON: But, what's keeping this alive, there's a lot of layers to this. First of all, they were fired, and then you have the cases where two elected members Congress called a U.S. attorney, Heather Wilson and Pete Domenici, and that might be a breach of ethics, but then you have what's keeping this alive now, is that Gonzales did not tell Congress everything. Now, that might seem, you know, unimportant to most people who'd rather care about healthcare and the war in Iraq, but that's what keeps this going, and that what allows Democrats to be furious and that they were not leveled with and that they were briefed, but not briefed completely and now they're going to have more hearings...

(CROSSTALK)

BARNES: Wait a minute. Wait a minute now, Mara. Do you think Democrats, absent the clumsiness about Alberto Gonzales, would just let this go?

LIASSON: No, but this allows them -- no, no, no, no...

(CROSSTALK)

BARNES: You're blaming this continuation on Alberto Gonzales and the Justice Department. That's what you just said.

LIASSON: What I'm saying is that allows...

(CROSSTALK)

BARNES: Wait a minute.

HUME: Hold it, hold it. Let him finish, then you.

BARNES: Let me add one other thing.

What if the firings were politically motivated? The president can fire U.S. attorneys who work for him for political reasons.

HUME: Yes, but and Democrats can call it political...

LIASSON: And nobody is saying he can't, and Democrats, in that case, which want to expose it as political and makes it...

KONDRACKE: Look, Democrats would have a point if there's a trial that's about to start, or an investigation that's underway of some Republican and the administration doesn't want that person prosecuted, to fire the U.S. attorney. That's political.

(CROSSTALK)

HUME: Of if there were an illegitimate case that a U.S. attorney refused to undertake and got bounced because of it.

KONDRACKE: Exactly, and there is no evidence of that in this case. I mean, the closest we get is this New Mexico case, and there were other grounds for firing...

HUME: Isn't it equally political -- or is it equally political, Mara, for Chuck Schumer, silent in the face of a mass firing of all the U.S. attorneys back in 1993 to be indignant now?

LIASSON: Yeah. If Clinton gets to have the U.S. attorneys he wants, which is what that was about, Bush gets...

HUME: All at once.

LIASSON: Bush gets the U.S. attorneys he wants. Now, the one thing that Democrats said, well he was trying to fire them to take advantage of a rule that would allow him to put new ones in without Congressional approval, in fact, Congress could never pull the plug on every one of the - - every one of the new one, if they didn't like them. They did get to go into office without confirmation, but they couldn't stay there.

HUME: When we come back with our panel, what General Pace said about homosexuals in the military and how some members of Congress reacted to that. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEN PETER PACE, CHRMN JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts, so the "don't ask, don't tell" allows the individual to serve the country.

REP NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), HOUSE SPEAKER: I think the military should carefully consider changing their policy. We need the most talented people. We need the language skills. We need patriotic Americans who exist across the board in our population. We don't need moral judgment from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: And the comment from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was not welcomed either by the Republican senior -- senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia, who said, "I respectfully, but strongly, disagree with the Chairman's view that homosexuality is immoral."

All of this led, finally, to a written statement by General Pace that said as follows: "In expressing my support for the current policy," which is also in the law, "I also offered some personal opinions about moral conduct. I should have focused more on my support of the policy and less on my personal moral views."

Well, nonetheless, the fat's in the fire now, and Pace is, to some extent, in the hot seat on all of this. Mort, should he be? What's going on here?

KONDRACKE: Well, you know, his -- I don't thing that the policy of the U.S. government on this issue ought to be based on the chairman of Joint Chiefs' ideas of morality.

HUME: Well, it isn't.

KONDRACKE: Morality -- of course. It ought to be based whether we can win wars with the policy. Now, there was a point at which generals and presidents thought that we couldn't achieve victory with an integrated, racially integrated military, and there was a time when it was thought you couldn't have good order in the military if men and women where in units together. That's all proved to be false, and my guess is that some day, not too distant from now, we will be allowing gays to serve along with straights and we'll get over it.

HUME: Well, we are, we're just identifying them.

KONDRACKE: Right. And, you know, it'll depend on their conduct, you know, it's a -- not -- I think it is against the law to put the make on somebody on a heterosexual bases on the military, unwelcome sexual advances, and the same thing would be true with homosexual advances.

LIASSON: Now look, the fact is that this is a Clinton-era policy that the Bush administration kept.

HUME: Well, it's a matter of law, it isn't it?

LIASSON: Yeah, it's a matter of law, but it was developed in the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton promised to allow gays to serve in the military and...

HUME: This is how he ended up...

LIASSON: This is how we ended up dealing with the opposition to that promise from the military from Sam Nunn and Colin Powell, actually. But, he came up with this compromise and it's interesting, because all of the major Democratic candidates, Senator Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, all of them are for overturning the policy, and I don't know what Clinton - - Bill Clinton, himself has to say about it now, but they're all for allowing gays to serve openly.

BARNES: I'm sure we'll hear soon what Bill Clinton thinks about it. Look, the mistake of General Paces was, as I think both you and Mort suggested, Brit, is to say -- is to offer his opinion about it's morally wrong, which, of course, isn't the basis for the policy.

The basis for the policy is that having open homosexuals in the military just won't work. It simply won't when you're living together in close quarters in the barracks with group showers and so on. I'm afraid it just won't work, just in the military.

This wouldn't be true, I mean, in journalism or business or politics or anything else, but the military is a special thing. It's a group, as Mort accurately said, is designed to win wars, and what has to be created is a certain camaraderie, and unit cohesion, and moral, and a spirit, that is hard to achieve, and I'm afraid having open homosexuals in there will impede that and I think that's what most of the military thinks. So, maybe Mort's right, maybe they'll change this policy sometime in the future, but not now.

KONDRACKE: Well, we are losing qualified, highly qualified people in the cases of the native Arab linguist. I think something like 83 of them...

HUME: It turns out it was exactly nine.

KONDRACKE: Well, whatever. Linguists -- there were more than that.

HUME: Well, no, the ones who were qualified, the pentagon study said nine.

BARNES: Well, they don't have to be in the military to be -- to serve as linguists for the government.

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