Bear in mind that several committees of Congress can legitimately be interested in particular deficiencies involving the attorneys under consideration. But in the absence of persuasive evidence that these deficiencies involved the commission of crimes, the president's claim to executive privilege will be hard to gainsay.
There is one area of investigation concerning which a president clearly cannot shield himself from exploration. That is the charge of malfeasance of office justifying impeachment. In the case of U.S. v. Nixon in 1974, Nixon attempted to withhold the famous tapes, pleading executive privilege. But he was quarreling with a special prosecutor who was in search of evidence on the matter of Watergate. The Supreme Court ruled that the president could not preserve from scrutiny data which would reveal whether federal crimes had been committed. As indeed they had been, which brought about the resignation from office of Mr. Nixon and would certainly, had he failed to resign, have brought on his impeachment.
Of one thing Mr. Bush is manifestly guilty. It is the criminal (in the metaphorical sense) mismanagement of the whole business of the U.S. attorneys. The fault is not personal; it was probably the attorney general and other advisers of the president who took so many clumsy steps. But Mr. Bush's stress on his rights invites a coordinate stress on his responsibilities. "These attorneys," he said, "serve at my pleasure." Right. But presidential pleasures have to rest on defensible grounds.
William F. Buckley
William F. Buckley, Jr. is editor-at-large of National Review, the prolific author of Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography.
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