Department of good timing. President Bush gives speech on the War on Terror during Gonzales testimony.
NRO’s Byron York: “It has been a disastrous morning for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales…”
It’s really true. Quite apart from the substance of what we’ve learned since mid-January and Gonzales’ past false statements, Gonzales has been surprisingly unable even to keep his made-up stories straight. As near as I can tell, only two Republican members of the committee have been even remotely sympathetic to his testimony. At least two Republican senators called him a liar. One gently — Graham, and another not so gently, Specter.
Sens. Hatch (R) and Cornyn (R) have been pretty embarrassing in their effort to clean up Gonzales’s mess on his behalf. But what’s been most telling is how much they’re the exceptions to the rule. None of the others are making much of any effort to cover for him.
A new poll suggests that John McCain’s “electability” problem may be as bad as Hillary’s. What will the pundits say?
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.
Howard Dean guru Joe Trippi signs up with the Edwards campaign.
From the buzz I’m hearing today, if Alberto Gonzales were a stock, we’d be at that point when those automatic trading halts kicked in because so many people are trying to sell. But let’s not get distracted by Alberto Gonzales. He’s just a cog. In almost every case, what we’re talking about here is Gonzales’s willingness to take orders from the White House — most importantly from Karl Rove and President Bush — on firing US Attorneys for corrupt purposes and using the Justice Department to suppress Democratic turnout in swing states. Mr. Gonzales is a secondary issue. The real players are in the White House.
We’ve opened up a reader discussion at TPMCafe: is this the end for the AG?
Don’t miss Alberto Gonzales’ heartfelt ode to the importance of protecting the right to vote for minorities. This from a man who has gutted the department’s Civil Rights Division.
There was a lot that’s simply laughable in his performance today, but I think this takes the cake.
Statement from Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino …
President Bush was pleased with the Attorney Generalâs testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senatorsâ questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. Attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses.
The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence.