Faced with growing questions about the role of his close adviser Karl Rove in the C.I.A. leak case, President Bush said on Monday that he would fire any member of his staff who "committed a crime."
[. . .]
Elaine D. Kaplan, who from 1998 to 2003 was head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency that investigates complaints of prohibited personnel practices, said: "Government employees and officials who are negligent with classified information can lose their jobs for carelessness. They don't have to be convicted of intentionally disseminating the information. Crime has never been the threshold. That's not the standard that applies to rank-and-file federal employees. They can be fired for misconduct well short of a crime."
Beth S. Slavet, a former chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that adjudicates federal employment cases, said: "The government can fire a Civil Service employee if it can show, by a preponderance of the evidence, that it would 'promote the efficiency of the service' to do so. The person does not have to be guilty of a crime. You can be dismissed because you didn't submit paperwork on time, you didn't follow instructions, you repeatedly showed up late for work or you yelled at supervisors and fellow workers."
Faced with growing questions about the role of his close adviser Karl Rove in the C.I.A. leak case, President Bush said on Monday that he would fire any member of his staff who "committed a crime."
The above is from David E. Sanger and Richard W. Stevenson's "Bush Responds to Questioning Over Leak Case" in this morning's New York Times. As Francisco noted yesterday, David Stout had a breaking story at the Times website on Bully Boy's latest statement that if anyone "committed a crime," he would fire them. Sanger and Stevenson are addressing that in this article. And credit them with having gotten opinions for what the latest shift may or may not mean (and crediting the source for the opinions). (Credit also Robert Pear who doesn't make the byline but gets a contributing note at the end of the article.)
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