There was great disappointment the other day when Alberto Gonzales and Patrick Fitzgerald shared the same stage but did not enter into dialogue about the firing of USAs, the ranking of Fitz as an average prosecutor, etc. However, the NYT reports that after Gonzo's fast exit from a subsequent press conference, he attended a closed door session, hosted by Fitz, at which the AG got an earful from several US attorneys.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales endured blunt criticism Tuesday from federal prosecutors who questioned the firings of eight United States attorneys, complained that the dismissals had undermined morale and expressed broader grievances about his leadership, according to people briefed on the discussion.[...]
In Chicago, some prosecutors accused Mr. Gonzales’s subordinates of operating as if the prosecutors were an obstacle to be side-stepped instead of a resource to be tapped in developing departmental policy, one person said.
At least one prosecutor complained that United States attorneys had been excluded from deliberations that led to a change in policy on prosecuting corporate crime, a person familiar with the discussions said. He and others would speak only on condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential. [...]
The host of the Chicago meeting was Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney there, who recently successfully prosecuted I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former White House official, on perjury charges. Mr. Fitzgerald’s spokesman declined to comment on the meeting.
The session was one of many that the Justice Department has arranged in hopes of calming the waters and improving the deterriorating morale inside the department.
There have been calls for appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the unprecedented firings of USAs, and I for one would love to see Fitzgerald get that appointment, though I suspect that won't happen. However, as the dots start to connect between the USA firings, their aborted or truncated investigaions, the political "team-building" in the GSA, the NH phone jamming, voter fraud, etc., etc., I think that such an investigation will need a prosecutor to effectively "RICO the GOP," exposing it as the criminal organization that it has become. "Vast right wing conspiracy" indeed. The trouble is: they've already got a lot of judges and investigators in their pockets, and legions of loyal Bushies installed throughout the Federal government, so any special prosecutor will no doubt encounter many obstructions of justice. To sort it all out, we may need a month of Fitzmases.