You know what Attorney General Alberto Gonzales really needs? Another scandal bringing his integrity and honesty into question. Oh wait, here’s one now. (thanks to S.W. for the tip)
Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.
Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.
It is unclear whether the president knew at the time of his decision that the Justice inquiry — to be conducted by the department’s internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility — would almost certainly examine the conduct of his attorney general.
Readers may recall when this first occurred. The Justice Department’s ethics office had launched a preliminary probe of the department’s lawyers who approved the president’s warrantless-search program. All of a sudden, the head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, H. Marshall Jarrett, explained that his staffers, all of whom had been subject to rigorous background checks, had been denied security clearances for access to information about the warrantless-search program. No clearance meant no investigation.
In July 2006, Gonzales acknowledged that Bush personally intervened to block the Justice Department investigation, but would not explain why. Senate Democrats howled and asked the Judiciary Committee to pursue the matter, but Senate Republicans, incurious bunch that they are, swept the whole thing under the rug.
Now, National Journal’s Murray Waas is filling in the blanks.
Sources familiar with the halted inquiry said that if the probe had been allowed to continue, it would have examined Gonzales’s role in authorizing the eavesdropping program while he was White House counsel, as well as his subsequent oversight of the program as attorney general.
Both the White House and Gonzales declined comment on two issues — whether Gonzales informed Bush that his own conduct was about to be scrutinized, and whether he urged the president to close down the investigation, which had been requested by Democratic members of Congress.
Current and former Justice Department officials, as well as experts in legal ethics, question the propriety of Gonzales’s continuing to advise Bush about the investigation after learning that it might examine his own actions. The attorney general, they say, was remiss if he did not disclose that information to the president. But if Gonzales did inform Bush about the possibility and the president responded by stymieing the probe, that would raise even more-serious questions as to whether Bush acted to protect Gonzales, they said.
President Bush’s shutting down of the Justice Department probe was disclosed in July. However, it has not been previously reported that investigators were about to question at least two crucial witnesses and examine documents that might have shed light on Gonzales’s role in authorizing and overseeing the eavesdropping program.
When one talks about obstructing justice, isn’t this a rather literal example?
Stephen Gillers, a law professor at the New York University School of Law and an expert on legal ethics issues, questioned Gonzales’s continued role in advising Bush in any capacity about the probe after he learned that his own conduct might be scrutinized: “If the attorney general was on notice that he was a person of interest to the OPR inquiry, he should have stepped aside and not been involved in any decisions about the scope or the continuation of the investigation.”
Robert Litt, a principal associate deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, agreed. Gonzales “should have recused himself. He should not have played a role in an investigation that touches upon him.”
An even more serious issue, according to Gillers, Litt, and others is whether Gonzales informed Bush that the investigation was going to examine his actions. “Did the president know that Gonzales might have been shutting down the police force when it was looking into his own behavior?” Gillers asked.
Charles Wolfram, a professor emeritus of legal ethics at Cornell University Law School, said that if Gonzales did not inform the president, Gonzales ill-served Bush and abused “the discretion of his office” for his own benefit. However, if Gonzales did inform Bush that the probe might harm Gonzales, then “both [men] are abusing the discretion of their offices,” Wolfram said.
Hilzoy wrote today, “There comes a point at which someone is too badly damaged to continue to function. Alberto Gonzales has reached that point and left it in the dust.”