Picks for Attorney GeneralThe likely candidates and our own wacky ideas.

Click here to read more of Slate's coverage of Alberto Gonzales.

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While there's a lot to be said about the allure of a candidate who is well outside the radioactive nuclear core of the Bush administration, and even more about the possibility of replacing the first Hispanic AG with the first black one, all arrows point to the likelihood that Thompson would rather stick with the sweet sugary team at Pepsi than wade back into the mess that is the Bush Justice Department. According to senior administration officials, that's why Thompson has repeatedly turned down offers to return to the government in the past. Why wade into someone else's fight over warrantless wiretapping when you can sit at your desk and rock out to this?

The Jimmy Stewart
What if the president wants an attorney general who absolutely reeks of wholesomeness and integrity; someone who is both of the Bush worldview and also somewhat above it? This is the come-hither for former Deputy Attorney General James Comey. With his spring testimony about the hospital room confrontation between Gonzales and his former boss John Ashcroft, Comey has become the heartthrob of the political and legal left—even though he once gunned for the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui and argued that José Padilla had no right to a defense lawyer.

There is no one who doesn't believe that Comey is a belt and suspenders Ashcroft conservative. But so what, because there is also no one who believes that he's a White House doormat. In a sense, that makes Comey the perfect compromise candidate. Congressional Democrats are so desperately in love with him that they'd tiptoe around his politics. Conservatives could see a true believer whose principal conviction is that the independence of the Justice Department from the White House borders on sacred. As Comey once testified, "If that [partisan firings of U.S. attorneys] was going on, it strikes at the core of what the department is. You can't have assistant U.S. attorneys in there based on their party affiliation. … You just cannot have that . . . I don't know any way you can get the department's reputation back about that." Comey's sweet Mr. Smith Goes to Washington idealism would be a tonic for the White House; it would affirm that the old way was the wrong way.

But of course, the chance of this White House rewarding Comey's past idealism and honesty with a job is close to zero. This is not an administration that rewards those who bite it in the ass (see We're-on-Crack below). Gonzales held on to his job for six months largely because he was happy to fold the DoJ into the White House operation—a clear signal that the president is less interested in a Jimmy Stewart than a new Fredo.

The We're-on-Crack Choice
If President Bush really wanted to show that he had nothing to hide at DoJ, to demonstrate how large-hearted he is, and to prove that he values hard-charging lawyers, he could always pick Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to replace Gonzales. Fitzgerald is also a Republican loyalist of a sort. He became U.S. attorney in 2001 as Bush's choice for the job. But of course, Fitzgerald's turn as the special prosecutor in the Scooter Libby case—for which he was tapped by none other than Comey—means that he's got no future in this administration. He was more likely to join the group of fired U.S. attorneys (his name was floated, if only briefly, admitted former Gonzales Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson) than to win a promotion now. In another administration, Fitzgerald's victory in the Libby case would have made him the perfect political cover now. But not in this one, because cover doesn't matter anymore. Punishing disloyalty does. We'd like to think the next attorney general—other names being bandied about are former Solicitor General Ted Olson, Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, and Securities and Exchange Commission head Christopher Cox—will be a lawyer first and a loyalist second. But events of the last seven years argue otherwise.

Meanwhile, it's worth recognizing that this is a mess that runs both wide and deep: Right now, the DoJ boasts no attorney general, no deputy attorney general, no No. 3, and no head of the Office of Legal Counsel. What if something legal were to happen in America? As one former DoJ lawyer asked us today, "Who has the stature and independence to fix all of this?" Maybe the truth is: nobody the Bush administration would ever pick.

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and an editor of DoubleX. Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

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