Gonzales must go. The DoJ has been shattered under his administration.

Daniel Metcalfe was a senior attorney at the Department of Justice where he worked from 1971 until he retired in January 2007. His interview with Legal Times provides an insight into the mismanagement of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Gonzales. This is a short summary of some of the points Mr. Metcalf made:

· The DoJ in the last two years under Alberto Gonzales has been politicized more even than under Ed Meese and John Mitchell.
· When Gonzales replaced Ashcroft there was a massive turnover of the top political appointees as though a new party had taken office.
· Replacing the previous political appointees was a crop of new, very young and inexperienced attorneys who had disdain for government as well as no knowledge about how it worked and why it worked that way. The kinds of problems that arose and the way they were mishandled was unsurprising considering the people in the jobs.
· Under Gonzales the process of decision-making changed from trying to put out the best quality product as quickly as reasonably possible to one of trying to achieve consensus on decisions while appeasing the desires of the White House, no matter how long it took. The process of decision-making by consensus had only a single benefit. It kept everyone involved from being individually responsible for the decision that resulted.
· Mr. Metcalf decided to retire when he was asked to approve an OpEd that he knew contained false and misleading statements about secrecy in government. The author of the OpEd knew full well that the material was false.
· The process of evaluating U.S. attorneys for retention had no criteria other than whether powerful people in the top ranks of DoJ liked them.
· “On one side, you had hard-nosed prosecutors who, for the most part, already had several years' experience under their belts (with little micromanagement from Ashcroft's people) and knew what they were doing already. On the other side, you had political aides who, among other things, had precious little management experience for their positions and were not necessarily adept at playing well with others, even when those others were political appointees like themselves. One need look no further than the extensively disclosed e-mails from Kyle Sampson, Mike Elston [chief of staff to McNulty], Monica Goodling and [Deputy Associate Attorney General] Will Moschella to get a clear picture of this.”
· When Mr. Metcalf retired morale of the career professionals at the DoJ was the lowest Mr. Metcalf had ever seen.

The solution to this disaster has to be to remove Alberto Gonzalez as soon as possible and replace him with seasoned professional attorney who has extensive government management experience and an unassailable reputation.

Frankly, I doubt that the members of the Bush administration or the Republican party even know such a person.