October 15, 2007
U.S. Attorneys, Then and Now Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:20 AM EST From the annals of U.S. attorney scandals, an interesting precedent: In 1977 Griffin Bell, President Jimmy Carter’s Attorney General, requested the resignation of David Marston, a former staff assistant to Republican Sen. Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, whom Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford, had appointed U.S. attorney for Philadelphia. Though he claimed no trial experience prior to his appointment, Marston had quickly emerged as a highly successful prosecutor, securing the convictions of several corrupt state legislators. In firing Marston, Bell was attempting to mollify Rep. Joshua Eilberg, a powerful Philadelphia congressman whose law firm was under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office and who had urged the President to place a Democrat in the position. It later emerged that neither Carter nor Bell knew of the pending investigation of Eilberg’s law firm at the moment they decided to fire Marston. The President and his attorney general assumed that Eilberg was simply interested in replacing a Republican appointee with a Democratic appointee. Nevertheless, the appearance of a partisan cover-up haunted Carter throughout the rest of his term and eerily foreshadowed the current controversy over the Bush administration’s firing of several U.S. attorneys.
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