LA Weekly: News: Indicting Ashcroft THAT ASHCROFT APPARENTLY LEARNED OF THE PHOENIX memo just days after September 11 and never bothered to tell his boss is by itself enough for the White House to put him on ice. But the scandal on Ashcroft's watch is much deeper. Start with the fact that the agencies whose bureaucracies stumbled most spectacularly -- the FBI and INS -- report directly to the attorney general. True, both were rife with problems that predate the Bush administration. But Ashcroft took office promising to clean the stables. Instead, he presided over some of the most scandalous and deadly bureaucratic misjudgments in American history, from last summer's active suppression of FBI investigations in Arizona and Minneapolis to those late-fall student visas granted two of the deceased hijackers.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, it was easy to blame red tape. But increasingly, Ashcroft's basic judgment is the issue. It was Ashcroft who insisted on naming Robert Mueller, a Justice bureaucrat under the first President Bush, as new FBI director. It was Ashcroft who kept the embarrassing news of Agent Williams' Phoenix memo from going to the president or Congress. It was Ashcroft who in the autumn took the September 11 investigation away from the one U.S. attorney in the country with experience and success prosecuting al Qaeda -- Mary Jo White in New York -- and gave it to the same Justice Department that (we now know) had bungled earlier inquiries. Senators are suddenly remembering that back in November, it was Ashcroft who in apparent deference to the sensibilities of the NRA refused to use the federal government's gun-owner registry in his terrorism investigation.