You know it’s bad when the second thing Alberto Gonzales says in an interview with Esquire is given an asterisk that directs you to more complete rendering of the facts the former attorney general is asserting.
But despite his pathological deceptiveness, Gonzales manages to be unintentionally very revealing about the U.S. attorney firings scandal which ultimately cost him his job as head of the most politicized Justice Department since at least the Nixon Administration. The mistake, you see, wasn’t that he let politics intrude on the the functioning of DOJ, it was that he and the White House didn’t pay enough attention to politics:
We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn’t see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn’t see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it.
Repentant? Not so much.
David Kurtz
David Kurtz is Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of Talking Points Memo where he oversees the news operations of TPM and its sister sites.