Remember all the comments [tag]Attorney General[/tag] [tag]Alberto Gonzales[/tag] has made this month about not having been directly involved with the [tag]prosecutor[/tag] purge? Right about now, Gonzales probably wishes you didn’t.
Internal [tag]Bush[/tag] administration e-mails suggest that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may have played a bigger role than he has acknowledged in the plan to fire several U.S. attorneys.
The e-mails, delivered to Congress Friday night, show that Gonzales attended an hour-long meeting on the firings on Nov. 27, 2006 – 10 days before seven U.S. attorneys were told to resign. The attorney general’s participation in the session calls into question his assertion that he was essentially in the dark about the firings.
By any reasonable measure, Gonzales’ claims were always hard to believe. The Attorney General was only passively aware of an unprecedented effort, coordinated with the White House, to fire U.S. Attorneys? He was out of the loop? His own chief of staff was helping execute the plan, but the Attorney General never even participated in a discussion about the purge? Please.
Tasia Scolinos, a Justice Department spokesperson, told reporters last night that Gonzales’s attendance at the hour-long meeting was not inconsistent with his past remarks.
This need not be complicated. Less than two weeks ago, Gonzales forcefully insisted, “I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on…. I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood.”
And yet we now know that Gonzales met with the Deputy Attorney general to discuss the firings. They didn’t run into each other at Starbucks; they had an hour-long meeting seven days before the Dec. 7 purge (a meeting which fell during the 18-day gap in Justice Department documents).
“Not inconsistent”? Oh come now.
“Another late-night document delivery has produced evidence of the attorney general’s involvement much earlier than he previously acknowledged. … This puts the attorney general front and center in these matters, contrary to information that had previously been provided to the public and Congress,” said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the latest e-mails could increase the pressure on Gonzales to resign. Sampson’s scheduled testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday should shed more light on Gonzales’ role.
“If the facts bear out that Attorney General Gonzales knew much more about the plan than he has previously admitted, then he can no longer serve as attorney general,” said Schumer, who has already called on Gonzales to step down.
That seems like a safe assumption.
Now, you might be wondering how it is that there could be two huge document-dumps in recent weeks, but this little tidbit of news wasn’t released until a third dump, late on a Friday afternoon. The NYT reported that Justice Department officials claimed there had been no intentional effort to delay the release. “Instead, they said, the e-mail messages were overlooked in past searches of office files and computers.” And since the DoJ has been so reliable and trustworthy on this issue up until now, there’s no reason in the world to question this claim.
There’s some other newsworthy updates from overnight that I’ll get to shortly, but I did want to note that Josh Marshall, who describes the newest revelations as “crystal clear proof” that “Gonzales was lying about his role in the US Attorney Purge,” suggested that we not be distracted by this.
Right-wing shills want to chalk the blundering administration response to US Attorney Purge scandal to incompetence. But just as we can infer the force of gravity from the descent of the falling apple, the panicked succession of lies and dodges out of the administration implies not incompetence but guilty knowledge of underlying bad acts.
This isn’t about the AG’s lies. It’s not about the attempted cover-up. It’s not about executive privilege and investigative process mumbojumbo.
This is about using US Attorneys to damage Democrats and protect Republicans, using the Department of Justice as a partisan cudgel in the war for national political dominance. All the secrecy and lies, the blundering and covering-up stems from this one central fact.
I think that’s largely right. I might quibble about looking past Gonzales’ demonstrable mendacity — the headlines this morning will certainly increase pressure for Gonzales to resign — but Josh’s broader point is important. The scandal is about far more than lying.