Re: The fact is, "[US Attorneys can be fired] any time for any reason
A partisan ignorantly replies, "I don't know how many times I've read or heard this, but it is patently untrue."
28 U.S.C ; 54 (c)
(a) The President shall appoint, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, a United States attorney for each judicial district.
(b) Each United States attorney shall be appointed for a term of four years. On the expiration of his term, a United States attorney shall continue to perform the duties of his office until his successor is appointed and qualifies.
(c) Each United States attorney is subject to removal by the President. END REFERENCE
Response: You need to get your head around the fact that it is legal for the president to fire any and all attorneys, and yet the REASON for the firing is still of vital interest to Congress and to Americans in general. And hence the investigation is perfectly proper.
To make it simple, let's take an analogy: Supposing a president asked the IRS to audit the tax statements of a group of people. Would he have the right to do it? Sure, if they were members of organized crime or suspected terrorists. But what if they were merely members of the opposition party?
Yes, he would probably still have the legal right to make that request, but if it was done in order to hurt his (or these days I should say "or her") opponents, it is morally wrong, and that is the kind of thing we should hear about in a democracy.
In fact, sadly, there has been a very recent case of this in New York State, where some aides to the Democratic governor asked the head of the state police to do some special investigations of a top Republican, and the results were subsequently leaked to harm that politician. When the news of the special investigation of the Republican came out, it caused a stink, harming not the Republican, but the Democrat.
In the current issue of the attorneys, the issue is not that some were fired. As you point out, the president has the right to fire some or all attorneys, and, has been frequently noted, Clinton fired all of them at one time. And, the issue also isn't whether Republican attorneys were fired or Democrat attorneys. Democratic presidents often fire Republican AGs, and vice versa. In this case, all the attorneys had been appointed by Bush earlier.
The issue is whether certain attorneys were fired because they either failed to prosecute Democrats or did prosecute Republicans before the election. When a politician has been announced to be "under investigation" that tends to harm that person's chances of election.
What if aides a top leader of one party asked that in a period of time shortly before the election that attorneys should tend to prosecute politicians from the other party as much as possible and to prosecute politicians from the same party as little as possible? What if just asking was not successful, so to put a little pressure on the attorneys, they created a list of attorneys to be fired who had failed to carry out the guidelines of prosecuting politicians from party A and not prosecuting those of party B?
Doing this would be perfectly legal; the president, as you say, has the right to fire any US attorney. But we have the right to know if indeed this alleged reason for the firings indeed was the case.
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A common response might be, "but there has been no evidence that any pressure was brought on the attorneys to investigate or not investigate." This may be true, but the investigation is far from over, and if it doesn't get the evidence it requires, we will never know.
