Today’s Must ReadI tell you, it’s hard work remembering what Alberto Gonzales remembers and doesn’t remember.
In October of last year, President Bush had a conversation with Gonzales about U.S. attorneys. According to the White House’s public statements, the conversation was a broad one, about voter fraud in three districts. Gonzales has said publicly that he doesn’t remember such a conversation taking place.
But that’s not what Kyle Sampson told congressional investigators this past weekend. According to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sampson said that in early March of this year, Gonzales told him about a conversation he’d had in October with Bush that was specifically about U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias. Remember that the White House was getting heavy pressure from Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and other New Mexico Republicans to can Iglesias.
So in early March, Gonzales told Sampson privately about this conversation (this was, by the way, before the White House had publicly disclosed that there had been any conversations between Bush and Gonzales about U.S. attorneys). But on March 26, Gonzales told NBC and the world that he didn’t remember having any such conversation.
But the Justice Department has an explanation! Spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that Gonzales really didn’t remember having such a conversation, and that when he’d told Sampson about it in early March, it was “based on what others had told him, not his own memory.”
That doesn’t quite solve it, though.
First, if Schumer’s relation of Sampson’s testimony is accurate, it seems clear that Sampson had not been under the impression that Gonzales himself didn’t remember the conversation when they spoke about it in early March.
But second, who were the “others” who told Gonzales this? The White House has a different version of the conversation — that it was broader, about three districts (New Mexico, Milwaukee, Philadelphia) where voter fraud wasn’t being aggressively pursued. Sampson’s version, which has the conversation focusing on Iglesias, implicates Bush much more directly in his removal. So who did Gonzales get this version from? Does he remember that?
