Not Bush's worst AG, but most disappointing

Scott Horton tears Michael Mukasey a new one:

Former Bush Administration Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey addressed the Federalist Society only hours after his successor, Eric Holder, announced his plan to bring a group of Guantánamo prisoners up on federal charges in Manhattan. He offered harsh words, claiming that the trials would prove a “circus.” Such attacks on the nation’s criminal justice system have become routine on the political right. * * *

Will the trials be a “circus”? No doubt there will be a circus on Fox News and in the pages of the Weekly Standard. But in the courtroom? An example is furnished by the case of the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, tried in a New York courtroom in 1995. The government charged that he planned to set off five bombs simultaneously, striking the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and a federal building housing the FBI. They showed videotapes of defendants mixing bomb ingredients in a garage before their arrest in 1993. The trial was a major test of the ability of prosecutors to present a terrorism case and of federal judges to manage it. The defendants wanted to use the case to turn themselves into martyrs, but the case was handled with exemplary decorum and fairness, producing convictions in 1995. There was no “circus.” The judge who presided over the case made his reputation through it. His name is Michael Mukasey.

What a sad, sad little man. No one ever had high hopes of Ashcroft or Gonzales, but many (including Horton) hoped for better from Mukasey. They erred.