Earlier I mentioned the exchange between AG Gonzales and Sen. Schumer (D-NY) in which the senator clearly caught the AG in a ridiculously transparent falsehood — claiming that the DOJ had told Carol Lam of their concerns with her immigration enforcement policies. That was a telling moment both in terms of the factual record and Gonzales’s fitness for any public office. This was a particularly silly fib because we have sworn testimony both from Lam herself and Kyle Sampson that it is simply not true. Indeed, the publicly-released documents also show no evidence that this is true. So even if you come at this hearing from the perspective of wanting Gonzales to brazen it out, to successfully lie his way through the questioning — even then, you’d have to wonder what he was thinking trying to pull this one off. Remember he’s been actively preparing for this testimony for more than a month.
But, as I’ve
said earlier here at TPM, we should not let the impact of the exposure of the AG’s falsehoods and attempted coverups to deflect our attention from what these facts mean. A wealth of circumstantial evidence points to the conclusion that Carol Lam was fired because her corruption investigation endangered Republican members of Congress and key administration officials. The DOJ and White House has sought to refute these claims with the suggestion that she was dismissed because of weak immigration enforcement. The fact that no one at the Department ever raised the issue with Lam points strongly to the conclusion that the ‘immigration enforcement’ line was developed as a cover to fire Lam for other reasons — namely to disrupt her investigation.
Indeed, the fact that Gonzales felt the need to fib on this point testifies to how central such a fact would be to making his story credible.
This is the central issue in the Lam firing. It’s central to the corruption Alberto Gonzales has brought to the Department of Justice.
