America’s Top Cop turns in his badge. Let the national mourning begin.
Gonzales presser at 10:30 . . . President to speak at 11:30 . . .
Late Update: President’s presser moved back to 11:50.
So Alberto Gonzales is going to have his press conference this morning at 10:30 AM to announce his resignation. Why is he going to say he’s resigning?
I don’t ask this mainly as a news issue, more as a chapter in the never-ending story of bogus explanations for resignations. Somehow, time with the family just won’t quite cut it in this case. And ‘I felt I’d accomplished my goal of destroying the Justice Department’ is probably a bit too candid as well.
So what is it going to be? Some version of my presence had become a distraction? I’d never planned on staying through January 2009? Your guess is as good as mine. All I can add is that Gonzales is probably the best I’ve ever seen of late in shameless statement of bald face lies. So I could actually see him going with, ‘I’d always planned to leave in August 2007’.
We’ll see soon enough.
John Edwards on Alberto Gonzales’ resignation: “Better late than never.” That and other news in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.
Solicitor General Paul Clement is reported to be President Bush’s choice for acting Attorney General.
Update: The AP is also reporting that a permanent replacement for Gonzales may not be announced before the President leaves for Australia next Monday, which at least suggests that the White House does plan on sending a nomination to the Senate for confirmation, rather than attempting some sort of recess appointment or other vacancy shenanigan.
Late Update: As U.S. News‘ “Washington Whispers” first reported over the weekend, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff is being floated as a possible permanent replacement for Gonzales. CNN is now reporting that Chertoff is the “likely” nominee. Considering that Chertoff presided over the Katrina disaster, his nomination as attorney general would be nothing short of unbelievable.
Well, that was as unceremonial and abrupt a resignation announcement from a cabinet official as we are likely to see for some time. Video soon . . .
Update: Here’s the video. Don’t blink. You might miss it.
We’re rounding up the reaction to the Gonzales resignation from key figures. Some of the highlights:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV): “Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job. He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say no to Karl Rove.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): “This will not bring peace. This will bring more chaos.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): âThe resignation of Attorney General Gonzales is long overdue. The rampant politicization of federal law enforcement that occurred under his tenure seriously eroded public confidence in our justice system.”
John Edwards: “Better late than never.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): “I spoke with the White House this morning, and suggested a couple of nominees who I believe would easily gain confirmation.”*
And my favorite, from Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL): “Alberto Gonzales is the first Attorney General who thought the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth were three different things.”
More reactions here.
*Just guessing, but one of Feinstein’s suggestions had to be former DAG Jim Comey, a non-starter for Bush.
Judged by the standards of our history, a recess appointment to replace Alberto Gonzales sounds like an incredible proposition. But don’t be so sure. Just as we saw with the ‘pardon scooter’ movement, the word seems already to have gone out to the folks on the right to start preparing the ground for just such a move by the president. I’ve already heard a few just this morning saying it would be the right thing for the president to do. Watch for it.
We saw the sour, petulant Bush on display in his public statement from Waco this morning. His longtime crony Alberto Gonzales remains “a talented honorable person” whose “good name was dragged through the mud” during “months of unfair treatment.”
We’ll have the video of the President’s statement up shortly.
Update: Here is the President, a discerning judge of men:
The New York Times has a little more of the weekend tick-tock leading up to the Gonzales resignation, and I must say that it strikes me as an especially carefully crafted and stage-managed departure:
A senior administration official said today that Mr. Gonzales, who was in Washington, had called the president in Crawford, Tex., on Friday to offer his resignation. The president rebuffed the offer, but said the two should talk face to face on Sunday.
Mr. Gonzales and his wife flew to Texas, and over lunch on Sunday the president accepted the resignation with regret, the official said.
On Saturday night Mr. Gonzales was contacted by his press spokesman to ask how the department should respond to inquiries from reporters about rumors of his resignation, and he told the spokesman to deny the reports.
White House spokesmen also insisted on Sunday that they did not believe that Mr. Gonzales was planning to resign. Aides to senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said over the weekend that they had received no suggestion from the administration that Mr. Gonzales intended to resign.
As late as Sunday afternoon, Mr. Gonzales himself was denying through his spokesman that he was quitting. The spokesman, Brian Rohrekasse, said Sunday that he telephoned the attorney general about the reports of his imminent resignation âand he said it wasnât true â so I donât know what more I can say.â
Lying to subordinates and the press is par for the course for these guys (and for much of official Washington in similar circumstances, truth be told). So nothing out of the ordinary there. But this elaborate choreograph, as related to The Times by administration officials, of Bush initially rebuffing the resignation, seems designed to emphasize that the timing and circumstances of Gonzales’ departure was of his own choosing and that the President’s hand was not being forced by Democrats on the Hill.
In short, I don’t buy that tick-tock as being an accurate reflection of events, not with an attorney general who became a bipartisan laughingstock perhaps unparalleled among cabinet officers in U.S. history. The man was run out of town. The White House effort seems designed to minimize the appearance of that fact. If a fraction of the effort that went into stage-managing the politics of the resignation were put into actually running the Justice Department, or governing generally, well, then we wouldn’t be mired quite as deeply in this mess as we are.