It’s kind of amusing to think that literally just a week ago, it seemed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was, facts be damned, going to keep his job. He believed he had “weathered the storm.” He was caught in the midst of a massive scandal he still can’t explain, his Justice Department is divided and dysfunctional, and he’d lost the trust of pretty much everyone who has objectively considered the facts, but Bush is satisfied — so Gonzales is “confident” that he’s going to stay right where he is.
For that matter, it seemed, for unclear reasons, that there was nothing Congress would do about it. Since James Comey’s Senate testimony on Tuesday, however, it’s become clear that Gonzales hadn’t weathered the storm, he was just in the storm’s eye.
We talked yesterday about the no-confidence resolution introduced by Sens. Schumer and Feinstein, and I was curious to see how much, if any, Republican push-back there’d be. If this morning’s news accounts are any indication, the GOP isn’t prepared to fight the resolution at all.
Gonzales continued to lose backing yesterday among GOP lawmakers as Norm Coleman (Minn.) became the sixth Senate Republican to call for his resignation. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) predicted Gonzales will resign once Congress completes an inquiry into the firings because he is “unable to perform his duties.”
“I have a sense that when we finish our investigation, we may have a conclusion of the tenure of the attorney general,” Specter said. […]
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said Bush “should obviously seriously consider” firing Gonzales over the 2004 incident.
Even Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), one of the GOP’s more shameless hacks, said yesterday that Gonzales’s resignation should now be considered a possibility. “When you have to spend more time up here on Capitol Hill instead of running the Justice Department, maybe you ought to think about it,” Roberts said.
For those keeping score at home, that’s 10 Republican senators who’ve publicly said they think it’s time for Gonzales to go, one way or another.
The guy’s toast.
For a couple of months, the debate over Gonzales’ future was fixated on what it would take to a) convince the AG that he had to step down; or b) convince Bush to get rid of his buddy. This week, the debate shifted — no one cares anymore what Gonzales or Bush think; Congress is going to deal with this on its own.
Just as an aside, it’s also worth noting that Time magazine reports that the Card/Gonzales meeting in Ashcroft’s hospital room was itself legally dubious.
“Executive branch rules require sensitive classified information to be discussed in specialized facilities that are designed to guard against the possibility that officials are being targeted for surveillance outside of the workplace,” says Georgetown Law Professor Neal Katyal, who was National Security Advisor to the Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton. “The hospital room of a cabinet official is exactly the type of target ripe for surveillance by a foreign power,” Katyal says. This particular information could have been highly sensitive. Says one government official familiar with the Terrorist Surveillance Program: “Since it’s that program, it may involve cryptographic information,” some of the most highly protected information in the intelligence community.
The law controlling the unwarranted disclosure of classified information that has been gained through electronic surveillance is particularly strict. In the past, everyone from low-level officers in the armed forces to sitting Senators have been investigated by the Justice department for the> intentional disclosure of such information. The penalty for “knowingly and willfully” disclosing information “concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States” carries a penalty up to 10 years in prison under U.S. law. “It’s the one you worry about, says the government official familiar with the program.
Stay tuned.