Senator: Gonzales Was Set to “Gum This To Death”While Alberto Gonzales is busy prepping for his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in two weeks, here’s a tough line of questioning that he can expect.
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) has publicly accused Gonzales of lying to him in a conversation late last year about the appointment of Tim Griffin to be the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock. Gonzales, Pryor says, promised him that the administration would submit Griffin for Senate confirmation, while privately plotting to string Pryor along for the remainder of Bush’s term, because Gonzales knew Griffin’s chances at confirmation were hopeless. It was a strategy that his chief of staff Kyle Sampson outlined in a lengthy email only a couple of days after Pryor’s conversation with Gonzales: armed with the newly won legal authority to indefinitely appoint U.S. attorneys, the administration didn’t need its nominees approved by the Senate, so they could just “run out the clock.” “I think we should gum this to death,” Sampson wrote, and after rattling off a list of stalling tactics, added: “All of this should be done in ‘good faith,’ of course.”
When Sampson testified last week, he only strengthened Pryor’s accusation that Gonzales had been stringing him along, lying to him as part of the strategy to keep Griffin in office until the end of Bush’s term.
Under questioning by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Sampson admitted that he’d touted the “bad idea” of using the Patriot Act provision to circumvent the Senate. When Specter asked him whether he’d talked about it wtih Gonzales, Sampson answered, ” I think I did, but I don’t think he ever liked the idea very much.” Sampson, oddly enough, couldn’t describe just how Gonzales expressed this dislike during their conversations. But he did say, “I don’t remember him specifically rejecting the idea until after he spoke with Senator Pryor in mid-December.”
Let that sink in. Gonzales and Sampson had conversations about circumventing the Senate to install a former aide of Karl Rove as the U.S. attorney in Arkansas. Gonzales didn’t reject the idea. And when it finally came time to implement the strategy when Griffin was appointed, Gonzales seemed to be reading from Kyle Sampson’s playbook.
Indeed, Pryor has said that his conversation with Gonzales very closely tracked the strategy laid out by Sampson to the White House in a December 19 email. In a speech on the Senate floor, Pryor described the striking similarities between Sampson’s Dec. 19th email and Gonzales’ Dec. 15th phone call:
I could spend all day talking about this memo. But, basically, in here they say that the Attorney General is going to tell us, Senator [Blanche] Lincoln (D-AR) and me, about six or seven things, and they did every single one of them. This is the playbook. They say ask the Senators to give him a chance. Attorney General Gonzales did ask me that. Meet with him. He asked me to, and I did. Give him some time in office. He asked for that, even though usually people don’t get a little test drive before they get appointed. He asked me–they wanted to delay, just run out the clock.
At one point he said if I am not happy they will interview other candidates that I am interested in. They also mentioned for me to consider him and to look at him in a way that he is doing a good job.
Here, again, every single thing in this memo was done. Again, this is the playbook. This is why I feel lied to. The truth is, I was lied to because I was told that the Attorney General–and he not only said it to me, he said it to the Senate Judiciary Committee and he said it to the world–the Attorney General wanted a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney in every slot. That is absolutely not true in Arkansas based on this e-mail from the Justice Department. I assure you when they put good faith in quotes that means they’re not proceeding in good faith. They didn’t proceed in good faith with me. And that’s one of the reasons why I think Attorney General Gonzales should resign immediately. I don’t think he has the credibility to run that department anymore.
Sampson’s testimony — that Gonzales did not specifically reject the idea until after this conversation with Pryor, most likely in “early January” — certainly makes it sound a lot like Gonzales was fully onboard with Sampson’s strategy.
When Gonzales testifies before the committee, he’ll likely point to his private remarks to Pryor and later public statements pledging Senate confirmation for U.S. attorneys to prove that he always intended to submit Griffin and others for Senate confirmation. But remember that such public pledges were part of the strategy laid out in Sampson’s email — in fact, it was the centerpiece of the strategy. The senators will be sure to ask if such assurances were made in good faith or “good faith.”
