The profile which comes together here though is one of legal partisanship, political hatchet-men and women dressed up as lawyers, representing corporate interests like Halliburton. It is ironic that the Gonzalez Justice Department is the weakest in recent history when it comes to prosecutorial skills and experience in top positions, yet those who lack such experience are the ones who have decided to fire prosecutors in the field. Could that be because the ones in the field were not on board with the partisan political agenda the others seem to share?

Let's just summarize the case with a few of the top officials under Gonzalez. They are, the Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who is the Chairman of Gonzalez advisory committee within the Department. McNulty succeeded Robert D. Mc Callum in March 2006, after Mc Callum was appointed Ambassador to Australia. Mc Callum was a Yale contemporary and friend of the President and said by some to be a Skull and Bones member. McNulty was not the first choice for the job. The first choice was Timothy Flanigan, who had been a supporter of Starr, an early participant in the Florida recount, and Deputy to Gonzalez in the WH Counsel office where he had helped draft the policies governing the war on terror, including those on torture.

Flanigan left government service and became counsel to Tyco Corporation where he hired Jack Abramoff as a lobbyist. This relation was too blatant to be accepted by the Senate Judiciary committee, for Flanigan, if appointed to Justice, would have been involved in investigating Abramoff, or overseeing the investigation. So McNulty, the man who successfully prosecuted John Walker Lindh, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali and Zacarias Moussaoui became number 2 instead. McNulty had an extensive career with the Republicans in Congress during the 1990's in the course of which he functioned as spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee during the failed effort to impeach President Clinton.

The official who is responsible for prosecuting Abramoff now seems to be Alice S. Fisher who is presently the head of the Criminal Division. Fisher nearly did not get approved for the job she had been nominated for. Senator Leahy of Vermont brought up the question of her reported relationship with Tom Delay's legal defense efforts and with Jack Abramoff as reasons why she should not be approved by the Senate Judiciary committee. Alice S. Fisher had been part of the Senate investigation of the Clintons in the name of the Whitewater scandal during the 1990's.

This division of the Justice Department has been handling several of the investigations into the Halliburton Company, which is still paying Vice-President Dick Cheney according to the latest issue of Halliburton Watch.  Halliburton has been under investigation at Justice since October of 2004 for bid-rigging, overcharging tax payers, bribery, criminal profiteering and other alleged crimes. Halliburton was a contributor to Attorney-General Gonzalez election campaigns for the Texas Supreme Court before.

It is not fair to hold Gonzalez responsible for these, or other appointments to the Justice department. The White House comes up with these appointments, and the originating agency is the White House Office of Personnel, which means Bush signs off on them himself. When these three appointments were being considered, the person in charge over there was Julie Myers, she was the former Chief of Staff for Michael Chertoff when he was the chief of the Justice Department's Criminal Division before he became head of the Department of Homeland Security. Myers had worked for sixteen months as part of Kenneth Starr's investigation into Bill Clinton. She is the niece of the Air Force General Myers who was Bush's former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, and she married Chertoff's chief of staff Michael Wood, before she went on to become Director of Immigration Criminal Enforcement as a result of a Bush recess appointment intended to avoid Senate scrutiny.

Starr, Solicitor-General under Bush's father, is a partner at the law firm of Kirkland and Ellis, Gonzalez present Chief of Staff Theodore Ullyot began his legal career at Kirkland and Ellis in the group directed by Kenneth Starr.

Gonzalez had been promoted to Attorney General from his previous position, counsel to the President. He assembled a team in that office which was intimately involved with all of the measures considered necessary after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Leading members of that team included Timothy Flanigan, the man who hired Abramoff to represent Tyco, Brett Kavanaugh, the lawyer who wrote Starr's report on the Monica Lewinsky investigation, who had as much litigation or prosecutorial experience as Fisher or Myers, pretty much none, yet who found himself appointed to the Washington District Appeals Court, much to the chagrin of members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who considered him to be completely unqualified for the job.

Julie Meyers was not the one who approved these and other appointments to Gonzalez' White House staff. That privilege fell to, or was arrogated by, David S. Addington, who at the time was Vice-President Cheney's personal counsel. Addington took over Libby's Chief of Staff slot when Libby was indicted. This story is recounted in a Washington Post article from January 4th 2005 in the period before the Gonzalez nomination hearings.

Addington of course is notorious, as this article describes, as the leading bureaucratic infighter for the unitary view of the presidency and war-time absolutism. Addington interviewed candidates for the position of Gonzalez' deputy, attended morning meetings of Gonzalez' staff, and drafted memos which would go out in the name of others.

Gonzalez had come to Washington from the Texas Supreme Court, where he had been elected in 1999 after two years service as Secretary of State, an appointment made after another two years service as George Bush's personal counsel. Prior to that appointment Gonzalez was a partner at the Austin law firm of Vinson and Elkins, one of the country's largest. Another partner of Vinson and Elkins was in Bush's administration as Governor of Texas. This was John L. Wood.

This John L. Wood also went to Washington in early 2001 for he had been appointed to the Bush Cheney environment transition team. But that was not all he did. This Vinson and Elkins partner was involved with the energy task force headed by Dick Cheney, former boss of the Vinson and Elkins client corporation Halliburton. One of Gonzalez first task in the office of Counsel to the President was to prevent the disclosure of information about that task force through the judicial process. When he went to Justice, it was after Justice had been compelled to open the Halliburton dossier which as yet remains unresolved.

Halliburton provided work for the tax, appellate and mergers and acquisitions departments of Vinson and Elkins, and probably many others. Donald F Wood, one time administrative partner responsible for representing clients involved in tax disputes with the Federal government, recounted how, in two cases of tax deficiency, where Halliburton owed more than $100 million, he reduced their eventual payment to less than 5% of the total amount. As noted Halliburton contributed to Gonzalez election campaign.  Gonzalez was involved in decisions which benefited Halliburton, and another major Texas energy player, the Enron corporation which was also a client of the Vinson and Elkins law firm.