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Conservatives like to talk about personal responsibility, but Attorney General Michael Mukasey does not seem to think it applies to the Bush administration. In a speech on Tuesday, he described the shameful politicization of the Justice Department as a “painful” episode in which “the system failed.”

Conservatives like to talk about personal responsibility, but Attorney General Michael Mukasey does not seem to think it applies to the Bush administration. In a speech on Tuesday, he described the shameful politicization of the Justice Department as a “painful” episode in which “the system failed.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general and its ethics office have issued a pair of reports confirming that top aides to Mr. Gonzales improperly used political litmus tests to fill nonpolitical positions. The politics was remarkably crude. One example: a career terrorism prosecutor was turned down for a counterterrorism position because his wife was an active Democrat.

Mr. Mukasey told the American Bar Association that he did not see any crimes to prosecute. “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime,” he said. In any case, the wrongdoers have been punished, he claimed, by “substantial negative publicity.”

The inspector general’s analysis of hiring practices lends credibility to even more disturbing claims that politically chosen prosecutors pursued politically motivated prosecutions.

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