Ah, so Cardona only has an additional 120 days.
Remember when the administration said the firing of the prosecutors was performance-based? Well, turns out they never said that.
The Daily Show has the story
Ashcroft: Officials fought over snooping
More smell form the skunkworks.
Bush Orders Miers Not to Testify
Bush Orders Former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to Defy House Committee's Subpoena
Excerpt:
By LAURIE KELLMAN Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON Jul 12, 2007 (AP)
President Bush ordered former counsel Harriet Miers to defy a congressional summons, even as a second former aide told a Senate panel Wednesday she knew of no involvement by Bush in the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors. Contempt citations against both women were a possibility.
House Democrats threatened to cite Miers if she refused to appear as subpoenaed for a Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday. The White House said she was immune from the subpoena and Bush had directed her not to appear, according to Miers' lawyer. Democrats said her immunity ended when she left her White House job.
Source
Is this really the US? Can you believe Bush has the gall to defy congress? Bush thinks "executive privilege" means he can run this country like a king without any check and balance. Tell me this isn't happening!
Showdown looms over fired prosecutors By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
39 minutes ago
A House panel cleared the way Thursday for contempt proceedings against former White House counsel Harriet Miers after she obeyed President Bush and skipped a hearing on the firings of federal prosecutors.
Addressing the empty chair where Miers had been subpoenaed to testify, Rep. Linda Sanchez ruled out of order Bush's executive privilege claim that his former advisers are immune from being summoned before Congress.
The House Judiciary subcommittee that Sanchez chairs voted 7-5 to sustain her ruling. The next step would be for the full Judiciary Committee to issue a finding that Miers, Bush's longtime friend and former Supreme Court nominee, was in contempt. Ultimately, the full House would have to vote on any contempt citation.
"Those claims are not legally valid," Sanchez, D-Calif., said of Bush's declaration, made Monday. "Ms. Miers is required pursuant to the subpoena to be here now."
The question grew more pressing when Bush ordered Miers to defy the committee's subpoena, unlike a lower-ranking former White House aide, Sara Taylor, who took a different approach Wednesday.
Acting under her own subpoena, Taylor appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in an attempt to satisfy both Congress and the White House and thereby avoid a contempt citation. It's unclear whether she was successful. She answered some questions while saying she could not answer others under Bush's directive. The Senate committee's ranking Republican advised Taylor that she might have been on safer legal ground had she said nothing.
Saying nothing is the strategy that Miers, on Bush's orders, adopted Thursday.
Like Taylor, Miers participated in the process of deciding which prosecutors to fire, according to e-mails released by the Justice Department. At one point, the documents showed, Miers proposed firing all 93 U.S. attorneys, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales rejected that suggestion.
Democrats want to ask her under oath about the White House's role in drawing up the firing list. But Bush invoked executive privilege, saying he needed to protect the flow of advice he receives from close advisers. Additionally, he declared Miers immune from subpoenas and ordered her to skip Thursday's hearing.
Democrats were furious, declaring the White House had reached "novel legal conclusions" to justify withholding a former aide's testimony, based only on legal opinions regarding currently serving White House officials and no court rulings.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said the committee must take action on Miers' non-compliance to preserve the panel's authority.
"Are congressional subpoenas to be honored or are they optional?" Conyers asked rhetorically. "Apparently we have to run this out" to set a precedent, he added.
Utah Rep. Chris Cannon, the senior Republican on the administrative law subcommittee, challenged Democrats to submit any evidence they have to justify their "incessant investigation" that has stretched all year. He warned that without evidence of wrongdoing, any court showdown with the White House would fail.
"It's time for the majority to stop swaggering its power in this Congress," Cannon said.
Legal scholars said the issue of Miers' immunity is far from clear-cut.
An argument that Miers has to testify "is certainly as tenable as that she doesn't," University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson says.
"If I were advising the congressional committees, what I would want to argue is that they have evidence that she was involved in what might have been criminal acts; that is, subordination of civil service hiring to unlawful considerations," Levinson said.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the White House "could not have picked worse ground" on which to fight executive privilege.
Many of the communications involve political operatives outside the White House; the White House already has offered to disclose the information but refused to do so under oath or with a transcript of the interviews. The issue is not in the sensitive areas of national security or diplomacy.
Legal scholars say it's unlikely the White House and Congress are bound for a head-on collision.
"We've been here many, many times before. This is not out of the ordinary," said Viet Dinh, the former assistant attorney general for legal policy during Bush's first term.
No president has gone as far as mounting a court fight to keep his aides from testifying on Capitol Hill, but court is just where the battle could end up absent the usual negotiated agreements of the past.
___
Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman contributed to this report
Gonzales denies pressuring Ashcroft
By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer
21 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Alberto Gonzales denied Tuesday that he and former White House chief of staff Andy Card tried during to pressure a hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft to recertify President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program.
But lawmakers continued to press for answers from a recalcitrant White House, with one senior Republican raising the prospect of a special prosecutor to probe areas where Bush has blocked Congress.
"The constitutional authority and responsibility for congressional oversight is gone," said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican. "If that is to happen, the president can run the government as he chooses, answer no questions."
Glaring at Gonzales just a few feet away at the witness table, Specter declared, "The attorney general has the authority to appoint a special prosecutor." He added later that a special prosecutor would be one of several options to consider months from now, if the Senate cites Bush administration officials with contempt of Congress.
Democrats weren't likely to stand in the way.
"I don't trust you," Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told Gonzales, who succeeded Ashcroft as attorney general.
Gonzales' credibility remained at issue throughout the proceedings, with senators of both parties growing exasperated and at some points accusing the attorney general of intentionally misleading the committee.
But the story about Gonzales' famous 2004 hospital visit elicited the most anger from senators because it addressed the concerns of some that the attorney general's loyalty to the president damaged his judgment and the Justice Department's independence.
Gonzales said that he and Card had been urged by congressional leaders of both parties to take steps necessary to ensure that the unidentified intelligence program survive a looming deadline for its expiration. To do that, Gonzales said, he needed Ashcroft's permission.
At the time, Ashcroft was in an intensive care unit recovering from gall bladder surgery and Gonzales was Bush's White House legal counsel. Ashcroft had transferred the powers of his office to Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
"We went there because we thought it was important for him to know where the congressional leadership was on this," Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee in his first public explanation of the meeting.
"Clearly if he had been competent and understood the facts and had been inclined to do so, yes we would have asked him," Gonzales added. "Andy Card and I didn't press him. We said 'Thank you' and we left."
Gonzales' version conflicts with Comey's.
"I was angry," Comey testified in May, releasing details of the meeting for the first time. "I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general."
Comey said that he and Ashcroft had decided against recertifying the classified program. There were concerns at the time about whether the domestic eavesdropping program violated civil liberties. The program was slated to expire on March 11, 2004, if not recertified by Justice.
But Gonzales said Tuesday that he did not know whether Ashcroft had made a decision or whether he had been aware of Comey's objections. Furthermore, he said, House and Senate leaders of both parties urged him during an emergency meeting earlier on March 10 to make sure the program survived the deadline.
"How can you get approval from Ashcroft for anything when he's under sedation and incapacitated? For anything?" Specter asked.
Special prosecutor weighed for Gonzales
By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer
33 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Angry senators suggested a special prosecutor should investigate misconduct at the Justice Department, accusing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday of deceit on the prosecutor firings and President Bush's eavesdropping program.
Who's going to hire the special prosecutor? Gonzales? Bush?
Congress can ask all they want, they can demand all they want. Until they move to impeach one or the other they aren't going to get any response.
Gonzales may have revealed classified meeting, committed perjury Will Menaker
Published: Wednesday July 25, 2007
Capitol Hill's leading daily seems to have it in for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Today's headline from yesterday's hearings? "Gonzales Digs Deeper Hole."
After finishing up his latest round of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales may have more than his credibility to lose. Wednesday's (paid-restricted) Roll Call reports the AG "may have put himself in legal jeopardy" as senators from both parties cast doubt on the veracity of his testimony.
Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) put it bluntly: "I do not find your testimony credible." He reminded Gonzales that the entire committee would review his testimony, in an apparent threat of legal consequences for lying to Congress.
Gonzales clashed with other senators over the many conflicting and shifting elements of his and others' testimony surrounding a 2004 trip Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andy Card took to visit then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in the hospital to gain approval for the President's warrantless wiretapping program.
In his testimony, Gonzales revealed for the first time a meeting with the so-called "Gang of Eight" -- the two top Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders and the chairmen and ranking members of both chambers' Intelligence committees -- on the same day as the Ashcroft hospital visit, where the members of Congress were supposedly briefed on "vitally important intelligence activities."
In revealing this meeting, Gonzales may have undercut his previous testimony in which he claimed the disagreement at the Justice Department was "not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people."
One "Gang of Eight" member, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who was present at this classified briefing took issue with Gonzales even speaking about the meeting, "'The attorney general is selectively declassifying material from a classified briefing, which I find improper.'"
Meanwhile, Harman questioned the appropriateness of Gonzales even revealing that there had been a classified Gang of Eight meeting.
"He doesn't have the authority to do that," she added.
Another "gang member," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), when asked if he believed Gonzales had perjured himself, responded, ""Based upon what I know about it, I'd have to say yes."
I am amazed that Alberto has not had a breakdown. But, like Bush, I guess he has a steely dogmatism that keeps him going.
Alberto Gonzales: petulant, embarrassing, triumphant.
Standing General
by Eve Fairbanks
ashington scandals have life spans. Like the life spans of human beings, vigorous and careful nourishment can lengthen them, but fundamentally they are determined by some mysterious, deep-hidden genetic code. At a certain point--often when they are just beginning to open into the full bloom of all they have to offer--they just start to wither and fade.
Sitting in this morning's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, it was clear that we are well into the U.S. attorney scandal's geriatric decline. The press tables were half empty. Senators trickled in late. Chairman Patrick Leahy, who rarely forgoes an opportunity to present his speeches with the full bombast of an ancient tragedian, mouthed his stock opener without any gusto. Gonzales, for his part, looked cheerful, shaking hands and laughing with Democratic Senator Ben Cardin. Even the protesters seemed less on point. At the last Gonzo hearing, riotous people dressed in attorney general masks and prison uniforms jockeyed to get into the room. Today, however, the main protester I noticed--an immaculately dressed, mournful-eyed man standing silently amid the onlookers--held up a sign that had little to do (at least, we hope) with the matter at hand: FBI, it read. STOP RAPING MY WIFE.
The decline in the Justice flap's power to shock and draw interest is a major shame, because so much more information has come out since Gonzales's last appearance on the Hill. Former Justice peon Monica Goodling has revealed that Gonzales probably tried to coach her testimony. Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's told an unexpected and bizarre tale of Gonzales and then-White House Chief of Staff Andy Card rushing at night to the bedside of sedated, post-surgical then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to try to get him to sign off on an intelligence issue (according to some, the warrantless surveillance program) other top Justice officials had decided was illegal. And now we have a Washington Post story revealing that the board meant to oversee intelligence abuses quietly went out of existence during Bush's first term. Today would have been a better moment than April to haul Gonzales before the eyes of the world for the first time, because for him to answer the question "Do you think you should still be attorney general?" in the affirmative now is just so much more insane.
epublican Senator Arlen Specter, actually, was the one committee member who really brought home the stark change in Gonzales's circumstances. The Democrats on the committee have always been hard on Gonzales, but, at the last hearing, Specter treated the attorney general like a concerned parent would a child: critically, but gently. Today, however, he threw the book at the Attorney General. "It seems to me this is decimating, Mr. Attorney General, to your credibility," he told Gonzales in his opening remarks. "Is your department functioning?" he shouted. "Do you review these matters?" Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein was in awe. "In my time in the Senate I have never heard comments like that coming from both sides of the aisle," she said. If there was any doubt as to whether Specter was the hero of the hearing, consider this withering exchange:
GONZALES: The visit to the hospital was about other issues. It was not the terrorist surveillance issue.
SPECTER: Do you expect us to believe that?
GONZALES: ... Mr. Comey had advised us that we could not get approval for vitally important antiterrorism acts.
SPECTER: How could you get approval from Ashcroft for anything?
GONZALES: Can I continue my story?
SPECTER: No.
GONZALES (increasingly irritated, shaking his fist): He could always reclaim [his authority]. There are no rules for that ... He could always reclaim it--
SPECTER: When he's sedated?!
At moments under the onslaught, Gonzales's voice thickened up, and he looked like he might cry--but angry-little-boy tears, not an adult's tears of mortification and regret. His testimony in response to all the new allegations was a mix of defiant petulance (of the sort he displayed with Specter) and earnest bewilderment. When Feinstein brought up the mysterious removal of the line "Most, if not all, investigations of election fraud must wait until after the election" from the handbook for federal election-fraud prosecutions this May--that is, after the whole U.S. attorney scandal blew up--Gonzales eagerly replied, "I would like the opportunity to look into it and get back to you," as though it had absolutely no relationship with the disturbing fact that obeying that very line was what got at least two of the U.S. attorneys fired. When Senator Ted Kennedy passed around copies of a 2006 department memo that questionably expanded the allowed interactions between Justice officials and White House officials, Gonzales furrowed his brow and said, "On its face, sitting here, I'm troubled by this," as though he had never seen it before. But he wrote the memo. His signature was right there.
That Gonzales wants to remain attorney general to heal the department he screwed up so badly--an idea he put forth many times at the hearing--is the apotheosis of the audacity displayed in these smaller episodes. He's already weathered the worst of this scandal, and he knows he probably won't go now. And so Gonzales was neither defensive, as most political types tend to be when under attack, nor contrite. He just appeared to be entirely without shame. Like the broken mole in a Whack-A-Mole console, no matter how many blows he receives, he maintains his infuriatingly rigid smile and won't go down. In this he recalls Bush during Katrina, Rumsfeld during Iraq, Cheney--well, Cheney all the time. In the end, I think this peculiarly uniform immunity to feelings of shame or remorse will stand as this administration's defining trait.
or now, though, Gonzales's weird imperviousness to attacks robs those attacks of their delicious appeal. I understood the Justice Department scandal fatigue that has set in these days when freshman Senator Sheldon Whitehouse delivered perhaps the single best line of the day, referring to the fact that FBI Director Robert Mueller asked FBI agents to physically prevent Gonzales from kicking James Comey out of Ashcroft's hospital room, apparently for fear that Comey was the only thing standing in the way of Gonzales wholly strong-arming Ashcroft. "When the FBI director considers you so nefarious that FBI agents were instructed not to leave you alone with the stricken attorney general, that's pretty serious," Whitehouse said. Ouch. But because didn't seem to faze Gonzales, it actually wasn't that funny or cutting. It was just pitiful.
Gonzales has been able to absorb everything. There's no real satisfaction to be had until either he's impeached or the cops come in January 2009 and drag him howling from his office. And that fact makes these endless hearings--not just Gonzales's, but Sara Taylor's and Monica Goodling's and the battles over whether or not Harriet Miers and Karl Rove will testify--seem righteous, but also futile, and therefore kind of a waste of time. Outside the hearing room, a young woman in a black suit complained to a colleague about the difficulty of keeping the cameras trained on the Senators. "They're moving a lot," she lamented. "They always move a lot. Today they're angry, so they're really moving a lot." But amid all this flailing around, does anything really get moved?
Eve Fairbanks is an assistant editor at The New Republic.
I think Gozales is in hot doodoo now.
Documents contradict Gonzales' testimony
By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer
35 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Documents indicate eight congressional leaders were briefed about the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program on the eve of its expiration in 2004, contradicting sworn Senate testimony this week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The documents underscore questions about Gonzales' credibility as senators consider whether a perjury investigation should be opened into conflicting accounts about the program and a dramatic March 2004 confrontation leading up to its potentially illegal reauthorization.
On another thread you're talking about how the independent prosecutor s in Bush's pocket, and how the congress is nothing but yap,yap,yap...
But Gonzales, you figure, is "in hot doodoo"?
Why should they do anything about him, if Rove, Cheney and everyone else can get away with anything?
snood, Have you seen anything completed by this congress? I haven't.
Hot doodoo doesn't mean he's in the tank yet.
I don't see any reason to have any expectation that anyone from this administration is going to any "tank" of any kind anywhere, anytime.
That's right, but at least more Americans, if they are paying attention, will see the corruption of this government. It seems more of them are, according to the following article.
RAW STORYPublished: Friday July 13, 2007
A new Associated Press-Ipsos poll has revealed that Democrats' confidence in Congress has dropped to 27 percent, nearing the already low Republican rating of 20 percent.
Two months prior, 35 percent of those polled approved of Congress' performance. Today, fewer people approve of Congress than of President Bush.
BBB
A little advice for Alberto Gonzales:
Hey Al, if you are going to be pursuing the title of world class liar, you should have taken some sidebar classes in lying while in law school. Your performance before Congress earned you and F and you flunked the course.
BBB
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A group of Senate Democrats on Thursday will call for a special counsel to investigate whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales perjured himself during Capitol Hill testimony.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testifies under oath Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The group said it plans to make the request in a letter to the solicitor general.
The development came just before Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer, Russ Feingold, Sheldon Whitehouse and Dianne Feinstein were set to hold a news conference on Gonzales' testimony before the Judiciary Committee this week.
It's the latest salvo in a dispute regarding President Bush's domestic surveillance program. On Wednesday night, the Justice Department said Gonzales "stands by" Senate testimony that appeared to contradict a memo about a White House meeting with congressional leaders in 2004.
Gonzales testified under oath Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the March 10, 2004, meeting -- when Gonzales was White House counsel -- was not prompted by the Bush administration's program to monitor communications with terror suspects overseas without warrants.
But a 2006 memo about the terrorist surveillance program provided to Congress by former National Intelligence Director John Negroponte names the White House meeting that Gonzales described.
Cycloptichorn
