Shultzing at the DoJ Continues

By Cernig

"To shultz" - to be defined as the action of not being aware of what's going on by virtue of deliberately looking the other way. It is, of course, based on Sgt. Schultz of Hogan's Heroes fame, who always went out of his way to know nothing and proclaimed the fact often and is most often used in cases where someone knows that if they are aware of what is going on then they will be held partly responsible for it.

It's going to be a very useful verb in the last two years of the Bush presidency.

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker today writes:

We were all treated to Gonzales' historical display of bumbling amnesia before the Senate Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago. Now we learn that the second in command, Paul McNulty, wasn't really in the loop, either. From The Washington Post:

Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty told congressional investigators that he had limited involvement in the firing last year of eight U.S. attorneys and that he did not choose any to be removed, congressional aides familiar with his statements said yesterday.

McNulty said he provided erroneous testimony to Congress in February because he had not been informed that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and his aides had been working with the White House on the firings for nearly two years, the congressional aides said.

Put this together with the news yesterday that McNulty, along with other members of the senior leadership in the department, had been cut out of the hiring and firing process for junior political appointees, and it's clear that he really didn't have much to do with running the place. From all evidence, that responsibility fell to Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling, two young aides who acted as little more than proxies for the White House.

As Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) puts it: "If the top folks at DOJ weren't the key decision-makers, it's less likely that lower-down people at DOJ were, and much more likely that people in the White House were making the major decisions."

I posted on this story yesterday too, and ommitted the stuff about McNulty and others being cut out of the loop as decisions were made to take their authority to hire and fire their own staff away from them.

The reason I did so is that I don't believe that they could have been cut out of the loop without their passive aquiesence in doing so. We're talking about powerful administration officials in their own right, heading their own staff's and no doubt playing officie politics while doing their jobs just like every other large organisation in existence. They must have known something was happening and decided to schultz the whole thing. Secondly, at some point they had to have been told they could no longer hire or fire as they used to be able to - and each had the option then to make a stink about it but didn't.

McNulty and other senior DoJ officials thus shultzed the whole issue in order to allow politicization which they had to have had a good idea was an administration aim.