No support for either Gonzales
IT IS DIFFICULT to say which version of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's role in the firing of eight US attorneys more disqualifies him as the nation's chief law enforcement officer. There is his version, in which he was only tangentially involved in an unprecedented mid term purge of federal prosecutors. If that is true, he allowed unsupervised underlings to handle one of the most important responsibilities of the Justice Department.
The other version is the one described by three of those aides: that Gonzales was closely involved in selecting US attorneys to be fired and building a case against them. If that version is true, Gonzales was lying again yesterday when he downplayed his role in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In either case, he should have long since resigned.
There were no bombshell revelations in yesterday's hearing, but it did provide new evidence of why Gonzales has been so deceitful about the firings. In at least some of the cases, the attorneys -- all Bush appointees -- were being canned for blatantly partisan reasons, either because the administration believed they were prosecuting Republican officeholders too aggressively or not prosecuting allegations of voter fraud by Democrats aggressively enough.
The Justice Department originally maintained that the firings were for reasons of poor performance. But Gonzales yesterday as much as admitted that performance was not the issue when he said that he ordered the dismissals without even looking at the attorneys' job evaluations. To yank prosecutors out of their offices and off ongoing investigations without even reviewing their evaluations is flagrant misconduct by Gonzales.
In one case that stands out, performance was ignored in the dismissal of the US attorney in New Mexico, David Iglesias, whose work was so highly regarded that at one point he was considered for promotion to a Justice Department position in Washington. Iglesias's shortcoming in the eyes of administration officials was his failure to bring voter fraud charges against Democrats, even after the evidence showed otherwise. This brought down on him the wrath of New Mexico's Republican senator, Pete Domenici. A review of Justice Department e-mails and other documents has revealed that Gonzales conferred about Iglesias with President Bush's top political aide, Karl Rove. Gonzales conferred with the president himself about the voter-fraud investigation in New Mexico.
That evidence might explain Gonzales's apparent lies and memory lapses -- he could be trying to conceal not only the partisan nature of the firings but also the fact that Bush and Rove were personally involved in politicizing the US attorney offices. It will not be easy for the Judiciary Committee to pursue this after the administration's revelation that millions of e-mails, including many that bore on the attorneys' firings, have been lost. Also, the Republican National Committee, where Rove had a personal e-mail account, has stated that four years of e-mails have been destroyed. Rove's attorney has said his e-mails were destroyed by accident.
The loss of the e-mails makes it all the more important that the Judiciary Committee persist in insisting that Rove and other administration officials testify -- under oath, in public, and with a transcript -- about their involvement in the attorneys' purge. "The Department of Justice," committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy said yesterday, "should never be reduced to another political arm of the White House -- this White House or any other White House." Gonzales's testimony yesterday did little to dampen the well-founded suspicions that this attorney general did let politics pull strings in his department. Leahy's committee should not relent until it finds out who the puppet master was.
