Bush's Partisan Department of Justice

Andrew Sullivan in What Rove Has Wrought? points out "The central question is whether the Bush administration has used the U.S. Attorneys as a systematic weapon in targeting the opposition party, rather than rooting out corruption and malfeasance wherever it appears." In this study he found that it's a little complicated and perhaps nefarious.

They looked at "U.S. Attorneys' federal investigation and/or indictment of 375 elected officials" from 2001-2006. The elected officials break down as 50% Democrats, 41% Republicans, and 9% Independents. If you look at the 66 state or federal officials who were invested there's not much partisan disparity, 55% of these investigations were Democrats and 45% were Republicans (none were independents). But if you look at the 309 investigations of local officials you'll find 85% were of Democrats, 12% were of Republicans and 3% were of independents.

The theory goes that the national press keeps tabs of the state and federal officials but the local ones are covered by local press. "This strikes me [Sullivan] as classic Rove. He works below the radar, using the U.S. Attorney system to throttle the opposition party, knowing that only local media will pick up on the local stories and that the pattern likely won't emerge in the national media. Hence the panic from Gonzales when the media started pulling at the thread. Pull some more, guys. We may have deep, deep corruption of the justice system, all designed to foment unstoppable, uncheckable one-party rule."