The new email revelations in the prosecutor purge scandal aren’t the only key updates from the last half-day. How about a round-up?
* The White House is hedging on Gonzales’ future.
“I’ve thought he could survive up until now,” said a senior Bush political strategist. “But if he’s shown to be a liar by these e-mails, he can’t tough it out for long.”
Bush’s inner circle hasn’t yet concluded Gonzales is finished, he added, but chief of staff Josh Bolten and chief counsel Fred Fielding are concerned that the attorney general’s credibility has slipped badly with this week’s revelations.
* Schumer says he has a source on the inside that told him that Gonzales may be a short-timer.
Schumer told reporters, “I know, from other sources, that there is an active and avid discussion in the White House whether [Gonzales] should stay or not,” adding that “the odds are very high that he will no longer be the attorney general.”
* On a related note, where’d the new emails come from? Schumer told reporters they came from a disgruntled Bush administration official.
“One of the reasons everything is getting out here is that there are people, particularly in the Justice Department, who have been so disgusted with what’s happening that information is getting out,” Schumer said. “And I think the White House and the Justice Department know it’s gonna get out whether they release it or not.”
* A second Senate Republican has called on Gonzales to resign.
“For the Justice Department to be effective before the U.S. Senate, it would be helpful” if Gonzales resigned, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., told USA TODAY this afternoon.
* The first House Republican has done the same.
Congressman Dana Rohrbacher became the latest Republican to say Gonzales should go, reports CBS News White House correspondent Jim Axelrod. “Even for Republicans this is a warning sign … saying there needs to be a change,” said Rohrbacher. “Maybe the president should have an attorney general who is less a personal friend and more professional in his approach.”
* Other GOP lawmakers may be right behind them.
GOP Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota said he is “deeply concerned about how this whole process has been handled.” Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., characterized the attorney general’s explanations for the firings as “unacceptable” and “mystifying.”
“When the matter goes volcanic for nine days, it is mystifying how the attorney general cannot explain why these people were fired,” Specter said in an interview. “I find his explanations unacceptable.” […]
Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., the Republican Party’s national chairman, said Bush might have to ask Gonzales to step down “at some point.”
* John McKay, the former U.S. Attorney for Seattle, called for an independent investigation of the scandal. As Paul Kiel explained, “McKay said that at very least, there should be an investigation by the DoJ’s Inspector General, but if that was opposed, a special prosecutor should be appointed.”
* Bud Cummins the former U.S. Attorney in Arkansas, has new questions about his own dismissal.
Still uncertain exactly why he was fired, former U.S. Atty. H.E. “Bud” Cummins III wonders whether it had something to do with the probe he opened into alleged corruption by Republican officials in Missouri amid a Senate race there that was promising to be a nail-biter. […]
In January 2006, he had begun looking into allegations that Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt had rewarded GOP supporters with lucrative contracts to run the state’s driver’s license offices. Cummins handled the case because U.S. attorneys in Missouri had recused themselves over potential conflicts of interest.
But in June, Cummins said, he was told by the Justice Department that he would be fired at year’s end to make room for Timothy Griffin — an operative tied to White House political guru Karl Rove.
In an interview Thursday, Cummins expressed disgust that the Bush administration may have fired him and the others for political reasons. “You have to firewall politics out of the Department of Justice. Because once it gets in, people question every decision you make. Now I keep asking myself: ‘What about the Blunt deal?’ “
* Classic exchange from yesterday’s White House press briefing:
Q The President said, “I’ve heard those allegations about political decision-making; it’s just not true.” How can he say that when he hasn’t seen all the emails, emails continue to come out, and of those that have already come out, some of them clearly seem to show that at some level, at least, there was political decision-making?
MR. SNOW: I’m not — how would you define “political decision-making”?
Q Well, decision-making that involves politics.
Q How would you define it, Tony?
MR. SNOW: Well, it’s a loaded term. I mean, I think what the President — what the President is saying is that there is no — that in evaluating U.S. attorneys, this is based on performance. And the important thing to do — and furthermore, the Department of Justice made recommendations that the President has accepted. Also keep in mind, the President has the authority to remove people and put other folks in the job. That is at his discretion. That’s presidential power.
Q But is he saying that he was so in the loop, then, that he definitely knew there was nothing political, or was he, in fact, removed, as you indicated this morning?
MR. SNOW: No, I think — again, what the President has — the Department of Justice has made recommendations, they’ve been approved. And it’s pretty clear that these things are based on performance and not on sort of attempts to do political retaliation, if you will.
What Snow thinks is “pretty clear” is very rarely “pretty clear.”
Stay tuned.