He Quits at Last

Finally, after all the damage has been done to the Justice Department, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III is quitting. Whether the report filed by independent counsel James C. McKay exonerates Meese or not is beside the point: Meese was never qualified in the first place, should never have been appointed and has consistently demonstrated his unsuitability for such a sensitive post. If, somewhere, there is a graduate student writing a dissertation on why Presidents should not nominate old cronies as attorneys general, Meese would be Exhibit 1.

From the moment he was named, Meese was swept up in widening controversies--over the loans that he received from friends angling for high-level federal jobs, over the favors that he did for the scandal-plagued Wedtech Corp., over his insistence that there was nothing wrong with an attorney general’s maintaining a friendship with someone like E. Robert Wallach, charged by the government with conspiracy and racketeering, over his bungling of the early stages of the Iran-Contra investigation. Throughout two investigations by independent counsel and numerous appearances before federal grand juries, Meese’s defense has been that he broke no law. That may be true, but that is hardly the standard by which an attorney general’s conduct should be judged.

Meese’s blindness to ethical issues has tarnished the Justice Department and driven away some of its best people, both political appointees and career lawyers; one of them, former Assistant Atty. Gen. William Weld of the criminal division, let it be known as he resigned that he would have indicted Meese. Meese also politicized the department with bad advice to the President about judicial appointments and a misguided campaign to make courts follow the “original intent” of the Constitution’s drafters. Once judges could rely on the department for a dispassionate reading of the intent of a statute or the scope of a constitutional protection; no more.

At his press conference on Tuesday, Meese said he was leaving now because McKay’s report “fully vindicates” him. He refused to resign earlier, he declared, because allowing himself to be “hounded out of office by false accusations or allegations . . . would undermine the integrity of our system of justice.” When McKay’s 830-page report is finally unsealed, when the Justice Department’s own Office of Professional Responsibility decides whether Meese violated federal ethics standards, Americans can judge for themselves whether Meese has been vindicated. We’re doubtful--in part because resigning is not the usual next step for someone who has been exonerated, in part because Meese’s record is so sordid. For Meese to express his commitment to the judicial system, a system that he so demeaned, is a fitting if ironic epitaph to a public career that should have ended long ago.