|
What we need to know now in the attorney-firing scandal |
|
By Josh Marshall
|
|
Posted: 05/24/07 06:47 PM [ET] |
Nothing works like good video and a strong first-person narrative.
That’s my take from last week’s testimony by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which Comey detailed the nighttime race to the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. As you know, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and then-Chief of Staff Andy Card rushed to George Washington Hospital to get Ashcroft’s sign-off on a still-secret government program. Comey got the word from Ashcroft’s wife that Gonzales and Card were on the way. And he rushed to the hospital too, beating the White House twosome to Ashcroft’s bedside by only a matter of minutes.
When Attorney General Gonzales testified before the House two weeks ago, most observers concluded that he’d weathered the storm. He certainly acted like that’s what he thought. And yet Comey’s testimony seemed to turn the tide again. New Republican members of Congress came forward to press for the AG’s resignation. And the new Democratic strategy of forcing a vote of no confidence on Gonzales may finally force the disgraced AG from office — or at least that’s what Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seems to think.
But what is it about Comey’s testimony that has swung the pendulum against Gonzales once again, and what more do we need to know?
If you’ve been following the U.S. attorney-purge story, you know that so much has already come out about Mr. Gonzales’s mix of dereliction of duty and willingness to manipulate the U.S. attorney system for partisan gain that it is hard to see how any new information, even Mr. Comey’s, could further diminish anyone’s confidence in his suitability for office. What could be worse than hiring and firing U.S. attorneys to aid a Republican effort to push bogus “vote fraud” allegations to suppress minority voter turnout? Or how about firing a U.S. attorney because he wouldn’t help out a struggling Republican House candidate with an election-timed indictment of a local Democrat?
The truth is that there’s plenty of evidence already in the public record to suggest that Alberto Gonzales has no business
being attorney general of the United States. But revelations contained in mountains of e-mails and carefully worded admissions just don’t have the punch of a first-person fact witness. So even though we’ve known the barest outlines of the hospital-room story for at least a year, based on published reports, Comey’s description of the events of that night may drive Gonzales from office even as the much more detailed and long-running record of his bad acts in the attorney-purge scandal could not.
But as long as the Comey drama is the issue of the day, there are two questions about the hospital-room showdown we need to know more about.
First, who ordered Gonzales and Card to Ashcroft’s bedside? Comey made it fairly clear in his testimony that he believed the call to the hospital, and thus presumably the order itself, had come directly from the president, though he was careful to make clear that he did not know this for a fact. Days later when President Bush was asked the question directly during his press conference with departing British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he refused to answer. Bush passed off this refusal as somehow tied to the classified nature of the program. But that makes no sense. The program may be super-secret; ordering Alberto Gonzales to John Ashcroft’s hospital room can’t be.
Second, when Comey’s testimony was first reported it was treated as a given in almost all news accounts that the unnamed program in question was the warrantless wiretapping program first revealed by The New York Times more than a year ago.
But was it? As observers on and off Capitol Hill have digested Comey’s testimony that’s become less and less clear. Alberto Gonzales has testified to Congress that the Justice Department never raised questions about the program’s legality. So did Gonzales lie? Or was the hospital-room showdown about a different program or some hitherto unknown part of the one in question? In their May 21 document request to Attorney General Gonzales, Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Specter address precisely this possibility.
Cataloguing all of Mr. Gonzales’s derelictions of duty and bad acts is a time-consuming business. But maybe Leahy and Specter will be up to the task. I wish them luck.
Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail:
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
. |
