A Promised Land

by Barack Obama

It was on the basis of those shared assumptions, more than our friendship or any particular agreement on issues, that I’d wanted him as my attorney general. It was also why I would end up being so scrupulous about shielding his office from White House interference in pending cases and investigations. There was no law expressly prohibiting such interference. At the end of the day, the AG and his or her deputies were part of the executive branch and thus served at the pleasure of the president. But the AG was first and foremost the people’s lawyer, not the president’s consigliere. Keeping politics out of the Justice Department’s investigative and prosecutorial decisions was a crucial democratic imperative, made glaringly apparent when the Watergate hearings revealed that Richard Nixon’s AG, John Mitchell, had actively participated in the cover-up of White House misdeeds and initiated criminal investigations into the president’s enemies.