How Obama Will Handle U.S. Attorney Posts Still Unclear

[cali]

One of the better spoils of winning the presidency is the power to appoint nearly 100 top prosecutors across the country. But filling the plum jobs has become a test of competing priorities for President Obama. While he pledged bipartisanship during his campaign, replacing the cadre of mostly conservative U.S. attorneys would signal a new direction.

When President Bill Clinton took office, he fired all U.S. attorneys at once, provoking intense criticism in the conservative legal community and among career lawyers at the Justice Department.

President George W. Bush took a different approach, slowly releasing several of the prosecutors but keeping in place Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, while she pursued terrorism cases and a politically sensitive investigation of Clinton's pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.


Obama has not made clear how he will build his own corps of prosecutors, a group that shapes an administration's approach to law enforcement and is critical to its smooth operation. U.S. attorneys' offices handled more than 100,000 criminal cases and recovered $1.3 billion in forfeited cash and property in the past fiscal year, according to a prosecutors' trade group.

The White House is under pressure from several fronts, both to appoint new prosecutors favored by members of Congress and, in other cases, to keep some U.S. attorneys from the Bush administration.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/12/AR2009031203736.html

[Enthusiast]

1. I have been wondering about this. nt

[L. Coyote]

3. Traditionally, Senators play a role in these selections.

[ThomWV]

2. He should take the resignations for each of them and tell each to expect to leave within 6 months

And then a small task force should be formed at Justice to put together recommendations for every post, taking into consideration the person now in the post, the inclinations of Congress, suggestions from the ABA or other orginizations, and whatever other information the President('s delagee) requires to make the hiring choices. Some might stay, most will go.