Unfit for chief law enforcer

ANY CREDIBILITY that Attorney General Albert Gonzales still had as the nation's chief law enforcement officer is in shreds after the tale told in the Senate Judiciary Commitee Tuesday. A former top US Justice aide testified that in 2004, Gonzales tried to pressure his predecessor, John Ashcroft, into approving the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps -- even though Ashcroft and the Justice Department thought they were illegal. At the time, Ashcroft was in a hospital recovering from major surgery and had temporarily turned over his authority to his deputy, James B. Comey.

In his testimony, Comey gave a riveting description of his race to Ashcroft's bedside on March 11, 2004, in fear that Gonzales and Andrew Card, then President Bush's chief of staff, would take advantage of Ashcroft's weakened state and wring from him an endorsement of the wiretapping. When Ashcroft stood by his guns, the administration went ahead without the Justice Department's approval, which Comey said caused him and FBI director Robert Mueller to consider resigning in protest. This prompted Bush to make some changes in the surveillance, which Comey said he could not detail because they were classified, and no one resigned.

In Comey's account, which no one in the Bush administration has disputed, Gonzales, then the White House counsel, appears so willing to do the bidding of those who favored the wiretapping -- even though it violated a 1978 law -- that he would take advantage of a Cabinet member in intensive care. Tuesday's disclosure moved another Republican senator, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, to call on Gonzales to resign. Other Republican senators who have insisted on his departure include John McCain of Arizona and John Sununu of New Hampshire.

One detail from Comey's testimony indicates how strongly the leaders of the department were united in their objections to the wiretapping. On that March night, Mueller instructed the FBI agents guarding Ashcroft that they were not to allow anyone to forcibly remove Comey from Ashcroft's hospital room.

Comey's testimony comes just days after Gonzales's latest appearance before Congress, in which he once again failed to give a cogent explanation of how and why the Justice Department, under his leadership, fired almost 10 percent of the nation's US attorneys, all Bush appointees, in an unprecedented midterm group sacking. Congress should pursue abundant evidence that several if not all of the prosecutors were fired for partisan political reasons and at the bidding of White House officials, including Karl Rove.

Anyone who did what Gonzales tried to do to Ashcroft would clearly not shrink at cooperating in a purge of some of the more talented federal prosecutors if asked to do so by the White House. He has no business serving as attorney general.