Opinion: Who’s on second?

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Not enough attention is being paid to the Bush administration’s appointment of Craig S. Morford, a career federal prosecutor, as acting deputy attorney general. If the seemingly invulnerable Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were to leave office — perhaps after a critical report by the department’s inspector general, who is looking into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the deputy attorney general would be acting attorney general until Gonzales’ successor could be confirmed by the Senate.

Now consider another scenario: Gonzales doesn’t step down, but the inspector general’s report emboldens the attorney general’s critics to demand the appointment of a special counsel (a euphemism for special prosecutor) to investigate the AG and/or White House officials.

Who would name such a counsel? Not Gonzales, obviously, even if he weren’t the focus of the investigation. As a former White House counsel, Gonzales likely would recuse himself from a case involving his former colleagues in the office of the president.

The decision would fall to the deputy AG, just as it did when John Ashcroft recused himself in the Valerie Plame leak case and Deputy Attorney General James Comey tapped Patrick Fitzgerald, now famous as Scooter Libby’s nemesis.

Given that the deputy attorney general would play such a pivotal role, the Bush administration should move quickly to submit Morford’s name to the Senate as soon as a background check is completed.

The administration can take comfort — or maybe not — in the fact that Morford’s appointment has won praise from one of Bush’s harshest critics on the Judiciary Committee, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). ‘’Mr. Morford starts out with one thing going for him,’ Schumer told The New York Times. ‘He’s a career prosecutor and not a politician.”’