At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the 2006 firings of several U.S. attorneys, Specter told former Deputy Attorney General James Comey that he believes Paul McNulty, who stepped down from the deputy attorney general post Monday, found it difficult to serve under Gonzales.

Specter also lambasted the testimony that Gonzales provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 19 as “hard to understand.”

It is “incredible in a sense — to say that he was not involved in discussions and not involved in deliberations, when his three top deputies said he was and the documentary evidence supported that,” Specter said.

But Specter also acknowledged that the fate of Gonzales’s tenure as attorney general is ultimately up to him and the president, even though “it is hard to see how the Department of Justice can function and perform its important duties with Mr. Gonzales remaining where he is.”

Specter added that he would not recommend to President Bush what he should do regarding Gonzales because he does not believe it his place to tell the president how to conduct the executive branch. But, he added, “I think the resignation of Mr. McNulty is another significant step and evidence that [the] department really cannot function with the continued leadership, or lack of leadership, of Attorney General Gonzales.

“It may well be that when we get to the end of the rainbow we will find the explanation may be as simple as outright incompetence — outright incompetence,” Specter said. “To consider firing [Special Prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald, which is what [former Gonzales Chief of Staff] Kyle Sampson testified to, is patently ridiculous.”