Friday, April 20, 2007
From the Dallas Morning News:
In his Senate testimony yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "The moment I believe I can no longer be effective, I will resign as attorney general." With respect, we suggest that Mr. Gonzales watch the tape of his disastrous showing in Thursday's hearing. Seeing is believing.
Senate Judiciary Committee members mauled the attorney general yesterday, but that was no surprise. Knowing that he was walking into an ambush, it was shocking to see how ill-prepared Mr. Gonzales was. His responses throughout a tough day of direct questioning failed to defend the firings, failed to explain his own role credibly and failed to establish that he is capable of running the Department of Justice.
NY Times chimes in too.
If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had gone to the Senate yesterday to convince the world that he ought to be fired, it’s hard to imagine how he could have done a better job, short of simply admitting the obvious: that the firing of eight United States attorneys was a partisan purge.
Mr. Gonzales came across as a dull-witted apparatchik incapable of running one of the most important departments in the executive branch.
But wait. There's more. The Boston Globe gets it's licks in.
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 Baltimore Sun questions Gonzales' credibility
To sum up, here's how the attorney general of the United States explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday how seven U.S. attorneys came to be fired last December, joining an eighth who had been let go earlier:
He was given a list of prosecutors to fire. He didn't at the time know why they were being fired, but he trusted his staff. Since then, he's looked into it and decided that firing them was the right thing to do. He doesn't know who prepared the list, or how. He did have discussions earlier with his staff about some of the attorneys, and their alleged shortcomings, but that was unrelated to the dismissal process.
Also, there's a whole lot he doesn't recall.
And finally, here is President Bush's reaction.
President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators’ 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.
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