Gonzales resigns; probes will continue

Democrats pledge to pursue facts on US attorney firings

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a close associate of President Bush who announced yesterday that he will resign next month, will continue to come under scrutiny from a congressional investigation into whether he worked with the White House in the firing of US attorneys and committed perjury when the Senate questioned him about it.

"This resignation is not the end of the story," said Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader. "Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House."

After withstanding months of pressure from newly empowered Democrats and some influential Republicans, Gonzales made his resignation official yesterday at a brief press conference but took no questions and gave no reason for his departure. Shortly afterward, Bush -- who had vowed to stand by his longtime friend and fellow Texan -- said he reluctantly accepted Gonzales's resignation, and then blamed partisan politics for the attorney general's decision to quit.

"It's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons," Bush said, just before boarding Air Force One in Texas for a political fund-raising trip to New Mexico. Gonzales submitted his resignation to Bush on Friday, effective Sept. 17, and the two met on Sunday at the president's Crawford ranch.

Bush said that Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, a stalwart conservative who has served in the administration since 2001, will replace Gonzales for now. The president did not say when or whether he would nominate a permanent replacement, which probably would set up a grueling confirmation process in the Senate.

Clement has been the legal point man for the Bush administration, defending in the Supreme Court the White House's position on everything from terrorist detention policies to assisted suicide, limits on abortion, and corporate regulation.

Clement is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and worked for John D. Ashcroft when Ashcroft was a US senator from Missouri. In the 2000 presidential race, Clement filed a brief at the US Supreme Court in support of Bush's effort to win the presidency.

One widely discussed possible nominee, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, triggered an immediate reaction from some Democrats, who warned that naming Chertoff would ignite new controversy over his handling of the government's response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Other names mentioned yesterday include Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general; Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy attorney general; and former senator John C. Danforth, a Missouri Republican.

Though the president blasted unnamed politicians who he said had hounded Gonzales from office, much of the intense pressure on the attorney general had come from fellow Republicans -- including Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination.

Senator John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, the first Republican to call for Gonzales's exit, said yesterday that the resignation, effective Sept. 17, "will finally allow a new attorney general to take on [the] task" of handling matters ranging from immigration to terror investigations. Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, meanwhile, said the attorney general's departure is "appropriate, necessary, and I believe, in the best interests of our nation."

The resignation was particularly bitter for Bush, who is losing another trusted, loyal ally. When Bush was governor of Texas, Gonzales served as Bush's counsel, was Texas's secretary of state, and was a state Supreme Court justice. He then joined Bush in Washington, first as White House counsel and then as attorney general, replacing Ashcroft in February 2005.

Raised in Humble, Texas, Gonzales is a graduate of Harvard Law School and was the first Latino to serve as the nation's top law enforcement officer.

In announcing his departure, Gonzales made no mention of the controversies that had enveloped him. Instead, he focused on his rise from a hardscrabble childhood to work in the White House and serve as attorney general.

"I have lived the American dream," said Gonzales, the son of a construction worker and grandson of migrants. "Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father's best days."

Bush's decision to let Gonzales go is the latest sign that the president wants to clear controversial figures from his administration as he prepares for the return of Congress from its summer recess and his final 17 months in office. Earlier this month, political adviser Karl Rove, a bare-knuckles strategist who frustrated Democrats, left the administration but will follow Bush's order to ignore a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the US attorneys controversy.

Presidential historian Robert Dallek said Gonzales's resignation "suggests how weakened a presidency this is now." He noted that next month, Bush and Congress will receive a much-anticipated progress report from General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq.

The president is apparently so concerned about the pending debate over Iraq "that he didn't want to add to his burdens by having the issue of Gonzales flare up again," said Dallek, a retired Boston University history professor.

Since joining Bush in Washington, Gonzales had become enmeshed in a series of controversies as White House counsel and as attorney general.

He played a key role in the Bush administration's policy of detaining enemy combatants at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and in crafting the standards for interrogation of detainees, which critics said was tantamount to a green light for torture. He was involved in Bush's decision to allow eavesdropping on electronic communications of some US citizens without approval from a special court.

Acting as White House counsel in 2004, he visited the hospital room of Ashcroft, who had just undergone emergency surgery, to get the eavesdropping program reauthorized.

James B. Comey, whom Ashcroft had given the power of acting attorney general, later testified that he tried to block Gonzales's move.

"I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man," he said.

Though Gonzales denied that allegation, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee were not convinced.

Neither was Specter: "I do not find your testimony to be credible," he told Gonzales.

Gonzales also angered Senate Judiciary Committee members with confusing statements about his role in the firing of nine US attorneys, which Democrats contend was politically motivated. One of them, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, said he lost his job because he did not prosecute Democrats on voter fraud charges just before the 2006 congressional elections.

After Gonzales testified that he was not involved in the decision to fire the federal prosecutors, the Justice Department released internal logs showing that he had attended an hourlong meeting about the firings.

Democrats said yesterday that the Senate will continue its investigations of the dismissal of US attorneys and the legal basis for the warrantless surveillance program.

Subpoenas are still out for documents and testimony by White House aides, including Rove.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat and judiciary committee member, hopes Bush's next pick for attorney general will cooperate.

"If the president nominates an attorney general who puts rule of law first, that attorney general will say, 'Let's find out what went wrong. Let's correct it and let's move on,' " Schumer said.

"It's a difficult choice for the Bush administration. On the one hand, they want to pick somebody whose paper trial doesn't raise a lot of questions, but on the other hand, they want somebody who's politically reliable, and those people usually have paper trials," said John J. Pitney Jr., a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College in California and a former GOP aide on Capitol Hill.

Bryan Bender of the Globe Washington Bureau contributed.