Sunday, April 15, 2007

Gonzales requested documents.

Gonzales is already attempting to get his version of the fired Attorney's scandal out in public before his appearance on Tuesday before Congress and he has an article giving his version of events in today's Washington Post.

It's highly unusual that someone should set out their defence in this way before they face their questioners, and I'm having a hard time trying to work out what Gonzales thinks he has to gain by publishing this article. He appears basically to be relying on the same defence that he has always relied on.

While I have never sought to deceive Congress or the American people, I also know that I created confusion with some of my recent statements about my role in this matter.
Confusion? That's a good way to put it. He didn't lie or obfuscate, he confused people.

To be clear: I directed my then-deputy chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to initiate this process; fully knew that it was occurring; and approved the final recommendations. Sampson periodically updated me on the review. As I recall, his updates were brief, relatively few in number and focused primarily on the review process.

During those conversations, to my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign.

However, just as Gonzales goes to print with this delicate attempt to get around his previous statements and the testimony of Kyle Sampson - which appeared to directly contradict Gonzales' previous statements - recently released documents are saying that whilst evaluating federal prosecutors the US Justice Department considered the political credentials of each candidate as part of the process. This surely strengthens the argument that the Democrats have been pushing that the sackings were made for political purposes.

There is also a chart amongst the latest documents which highlights the political credentials of each of the 124 US attorneys nominated since 2001. And there is a note from Monica Goodling, who resigned last week and is refusing to testify, which says:

"This is the chart that the AG [Alberto Gonzales] requested, I'll show it to him on the plane tomorrow, if he's interested."

So here we have Gonzales requesting a chart that specifically outlines each prosecutors political affiliations. This seems very out of place for a man who has always sought to portray this as something he delegated and then took little further interest in, which has been his claim to date.

Indeed, during a March 13 Press Conference at the Justice Department he stated:
"I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood," Gonzales said then. "What I knew was that there was an ongoing effort that was led by Mr. Sampson, vetted through the Department of Justice, to ascertain where we could make improvements in U.S. attorney performances around the country."
The chart, that he himself is said to have requested, undermines his first point and his own statement in today's Washington Post - "Sampson periodically updated me on the review" - would appear to undermine his second. What is a "periodic update" if not a "discussion about where things stood"?

The chart underscores the weight that conservative credentials carried with the Justice Department.

The three-page spreadsheet notes the "political experience" of each prosecutor, which was defined as work at the Justice Department's headquarters in Washington, on Capitol Hill, for state or local officials, and on campaigns or for political parties.

Several of the 124 prosecutors on the list were also members of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. The group was founded by conservative law students and now claims 35,000 members, including prominent members of the Bush administration, the federal judiciary and Congress.

How the information was used by the administration isn't clear.

Bush is said to have great faith that Gonzales can survive this controversy. They say faith can move mountains. In this case, it will have to.

Click title for Gonzales article.

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