Their budgets were line items under the federal judiciary, not the executive. When George Washington appointed the nation’s first attorney general in 1789, Thomas Jefferson referred to him as “the Attorney General for the Supreme Court.” Early attorneys general shared offices with the court. Congress changed this so that attorneys general would be appointed exactly like federal judges. In the original draft, attorneys general would be appointed by the Supreme Court, not the president. The attorney general was originally viewed as having an independent, semi-judicial role - analogous to that of judges.Ĭongress established the office of the attorney general in the Judiciary Act of 1789 - the same act that created the federal court system, as distinct from acts establishing executive departments. Yet there was some precedent for Ervin’s view. I assumed America had learned its lesson from Watergate and would never again elect a president as repugnant as Nixon, willing to sacrifice the institutions of government to his own political ambition. Ervin wanted to make the Justice Department an independent agency with an attorney general appointed by the president every six years and removable only for neglect.Īt the time, I thought Ervin’s proposal too extreme. The Senate Watergate Committee chairman, Senator Sam Ervin, didn’t think Levi’s rules went far enough to protect the department from an unscrupulous future president. Levi set out to insulate the Justice Department from politics, instituting rules limiting White House involvement in law enforcement decisions. In naming Levi, who had been president of the University of Chicago and the former dean of its law school, Ford found someone whose reputation for integrity was impeccable.Īs Levi said at his swearing in, “Nothing can more weaken the quality of life or more imperil the realization of the goals we all hold dear than our failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose.” To restore trust in the Justice Department, President Gerald Ford appointed Edward Levi to be attorney general. The department was in shambles, discredited by Nixon’s and Attorney General John Mitchell’s political abuse and corruption. His remark made me think back almost a half century ago, to when I was a rookie lawyer in the Justice Department. In other words, if Trump is reelected, you can kiss nonpartisan criminal justice goodbye. Last week, Trump said that if reelected, he’d appoint a “real special prosecutor” to “go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”
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