Gonzales:
It’s Official

KATE PHILLIPS / New York Times 27aug2007

Another Bush Hack Jumps the Sinking Ship

In an extremely brief statement, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation, saying that he would complete his work by Sept. 17.

Mr. Gonzales, a Mexican-American whose successes in life President Bush had proudly outlined many times, said today that “I have lived the American dream. Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father’s best days.” That was Mr. Gonzales’ only allusion to the bad days he’s experienced.

He thanked Mr. Bush and thanked Justice Department employees, and quickly departed the lectern without taking any questions. He said he had informed the president of his decision to resign yesterday — a decision that took many by surprise because it flew in the face of Mr. Bush’s adamant pronouncements that he would not ask Mr. Gonzales to leave.

While many Democrats were busily issuing statements today applauding the departure of the controversial top prosecutor, (see our earlier post) some Bush loyalists and fellow Texans continued to form a line of defense for Mr. Gonzales.

Senator John Cornyn, one of the attorney general’s staunchest supporters, called today a “sad day.” In a telephone interview with CNN a short while ago, the Texas Republican took issue with how Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, was “exalting” in Mr. Gonzales’ resignation, calling it part of the “hyperpartisan” atmosphere in Washington today. Mr. Cornyn insisted there was no evidence of political machinations behind the firings of federal prosecutors, and said it was the “drip, drip, drip” of partisan politics that wore Mr. Gonzales down.

Democratic leaders have pursued several lines of inquiry into Justice Department policies and procedures, accusing President Bush and Mr. Gonzales of politicizing the appointments of federal prosecutors and of violating the constitution through the implementation of surveillance programs.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed to vow in his statement today that those investigations would indeed go on:

“Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job. He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say no to Karl Rove. This resignation is not the end of the story. Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued this statement:

“The resignation of Attorney General Gonzales is long overdue. The rampant politicization of federal law enforcement that occurred under his tenure seriously eroded public confidence in our justice system.

“The President must now restore credibility to the office of the Attorney General. Given the serious loss of public trust and the disarray at the Department of Justice, the American people must have absolute confidence in the integrity of the next Attorney General as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and as defender of our constitution independent of political influence. The President’s nominee must have the character and stature to command that confidence.

“The nominee must also pledge to cooperate with ongoing congressional oversight into the conduct of the White House in the politicization of federal law enforcement. Hearings on the nominee will provide Congress with another opportunity to examine the new, flawed FISA law and will aid in our efforts to improve it.”

Mr. Cornyn predicted that Mr. Gonzales’ replacement — no one has been named yet although Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff’s name is out there — would be used like a political football during the confirmation hearings by the Democratic-controlled Senate to continue to bash the Bush administration.

source: 27aug2007

Gonzales Goes
But Investigation Must Continue

JOHN NICHOLS / The Nation 27aug2007

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is a lawyer. He's the man whose work justified the torture in Iraq.  In January 2002, Alberto Gonzales wrote a memo in which he called the Geneva Conventions both “quaint” and “obsolete.” In August of that same year, Judge Gonzales went even further, initiating and overseeing a process that produced a memo claiming U.S. torture laws “do not apply to the President’s detention and interrogation of enemy combatants.” These so-called “torture memos” fueled the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. More on Gonzales

Facing the prospect of increasingly aggressive congressional inquiries into his politicization of the Department of Justice, as well as an energetic House push for his impeachment, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has announced that he will resign effective September 17.

Gonzales, the former White House counsel who made clear during his two-and-a-half-year tenure as the nation's top cop that he served President Bush rather than the Constitution, announced his exit strategy just days before the Congress returns from a summer break during which senators and representatives had gotten an earful about the need to get rid of Gonzales.

A proposal by Washington Democrat Jay Inslee, a respected former prosecutor, to have the House Judiciary Committee investigate whether Gonzales should be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, attracted 27 cosponsors during the current recess and would have drawn many more with the return of the House in early September.

The Attorney General was ripe for impeachment — or, at the very least, the censure proposed by U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin — because of a rapidly broadening recognition that Gonzales had displayed a blatant disregard for the law since his arrival in Washington in 2001 at the side of his longtime friend and political benefactor George Bush.

"Alberto Gonzales was the 'Enabler General' for the imperial Bush presidency," said People For the American Way President emeritus Ralph G. Neas upon learning of the Attorney General's decision. "He undermined the Constitution, made a mockery of the rule of law, and turned the Justice Department into an arm of the Bush Administration's political operation.

Gonzales, whose signature line was a declaration that he served "at the pleasure of the president," made it his business as White House Counsel and Attorney General to do just that.

As Feingold said this morning, "Attorney General Gonzales' tenure was marked by unprecedented politicization of the Department of Justice, deception of Congress and the American people, and disrespect for the rule of law. He should never have been confirmed and should have resigned long ago. The first loyalty of the next attorney general must be to the law, not the president."

Gonzales reversed the "first loyalty" equation enunciated by Feingold.

As Counsel from 2001 to 2005, Gonzales blocked requests from the General Accounting Office for information about Enron officials meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force. He refused requests from congressional committees for information that the House and Senate had a right — and a need. He made the legal case for torture, despite the fact that the Constitution bars cruel and unusual punishment. He outlined schemes for subverting the judicial system and its rules by making terror suspects eligible for military tribunals. He helped convince Bush to refuse to afford prisoners held at Guantanamo the basic protections afforded prisoner-of-war under treaties the United States had accepted as the law of the land.

As the nation's 80th Attorney General — a position he took in February, 2005, after the Senate vote 60-36 to confirm his nomination — Gonzales extended his representation of Bush into should be an independent federal agency. He defended the president's authorization of an illegal warrantless wiretapping program. He accepted the "extraordinary rendition" of suspects from U.S. custody to that of torture regimes. And he turned the Department of Justice into an extension of Karl Rove's White House political shop.

Revelations about the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys who were seen by the administration as insufficiently political in their investigations and prosecutions opened up an investigation that has begun to confirm a broad scheme to politicize the Justice Department's work in the area of voting rights — a scheme apparently designed by Rove to suppress turnout by minorities and others who might vote Democratic.

The investigation into those machinations has hit the administration hard — so hard that the president is now jettisoning his oldest and closest aides in order to prevent the inquiry from evolving into a serious examination of his own lawlessness.

Today's exit announcement by Gonzales comes just days after Rove signaled his plan to go.

The important thing now is to make sure that the administration does not succeed in using high-profile departures to shut down — or, at the very least, to diminish the seriousness and the extent of — those inquiries.

When Rove announced the he was leaving, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, made it clear that the political aide remained a target of broad inquiries by the judiciary committees of the House and Senate.

"Mr. Rove acted as if he was above the law. That is wrong, Leahy said at the time. "Now that he is leaving the White House while under subpoena, I continue to ask what Mr. Rove and others at the White House are so desperate to hide. Mr. Rove's apparent attempts to manipulate elections and push out prosecutors citing bogus claims of voter fraud shows corruption of federal law enforcement for partisan political purposes, and the Senate Judiciary Committee will continue its investigation into this serious issue."

Referencing the growing sense that the inquiry into wrongdoing in and around the Justice Department could yet be the undoing of the Bush-Cheney administration, Leahy added, "The list of senior White House and Justice Department officials who have resigned during the course of these congressional investigations continues to grow, and today, Mr. Rove added his name to that list. There is a cloud over this White House, and a gathering storm. A similar cloud envelopes Mr. Rove, even as he leaves the White House."

The "list" referenced by Leahy gets longer with the news that Gonzales is going.

But the essential question with regard to Gonzales remains the same as the question that Leahy laid down when Rove said he would go: What are these people so desperate to hide?

The answer is that, just as Gonzales and Rove served Bush rather than the Constitution, they now seek with their resignations to protect Bush — and Vice President Cheney — from investigations that are necessary to any serious effort to restore the primacy of the founding document in the affairs of the nation.

Only a continued inquiry into the lawlessness of the soon-to-be-former Attorney General will achieve what is the essential purpose of this Congress: the restoring of the rule of law to a country deeply damaged by petty little men who chose personal loyalties and political expediency over their duty to the Republic.

John Nichols' new book is THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.'"

source: 27aug2007

Gonzales Has Been
Loyal Voice for Administration

CNN 27aug2007

President Bush has placed a lot of faith in Alberto Gonzales over the last 12 years.

Gonzales' resume glistens with appointments and nominations made by the 43rd president: Texas gubernatorial counsel, Texas secretary of state, Texas Supreme Court justice, White House counsel, U.S. attorney general — the post he is now leaving.

In a 2005 interview, Gonzales, the nation's first Latino attorney general, recalled how he initially garnered Bush's attention when Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, asked him to come work in the White House in 1990.

At the time, Gonzales was an attorney with Vinson & Elkins, a massive Texas law firm that boasted Enron and Halliburton among its clientele, and Gonzales was ready to excel in the private realm.

"I wanted to stay and make partner, and so I said no," Gonzales told the Academy of Achievement of his encounter with the elder Bush.

Five years later, he was approached by the son. "I first got on his radar screen because I had turned his old man down for a job," Gonzales recalled to the academy.

The son of migrant workers, the 52-year-old attorney general has admitted he wanted to be a pilot until heavy math and science course loads at the U.S. Air Force Academy made him think about a career in law or government.

Gonzales' foray into the public sector provided a career in both, and he has demonstrated unflinching loyalty to the man who led him there, despite not always brandishing his own conservative credentials.

As a Texas Supreme Court justice, Gonzales earned the ire of his party when he voted with a 6-3 majority in 2000 to overturn a Bush-backed law that prohibited minors from having abortions without notifying their parents.

He later told Texas Monthly magazine that he had an obligation "to impartially apply the laws of this state without imposing my moral view on the decision of the Legislature."

His moderate voting record proved to be a millstone around his neck, as both liberals and conservatives attacked him when mutterings of a U.S. Supreme Court nomination arose years later.

One legal conservative told The New Republic in 2002 that Gonzales "was a very workmanlike judge who was not likely to rule on either extreme." Similar reports prompted the magazine to declare that Gonzales was "too liberal to be nominated and too conservative to be confirmed."

Once White House counsel, however, Gonzales' priorities seemed to turn to protecting the administration. When the General Accounting Office wanted information about Enron officials meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force, Gonzales was there to say no way.

He later insulated Bush from congressional records requests and publicly defended the president's order making non-American terror suspects eligible for military tribunals. He also advised Bush to refuse to give prisoner-of-war status to suspected al Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

After his 60-36 confirmation as the 80th U.S. attorney general in 2005, Gonzales continued his role as protector, defending the National Security Agency's wiretapping program and, more recently, taking responsibility in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, some of whom claim they were political casualties.

The grandson of Mexican immigrants, Gonzales was born August 4, 1955, and grew up poor in Houston, Texas, with seven brothers and sisters. His parents, Pablo and Maria, were migrant workers with elementary school educations.

Though his father had "a terrible drinking problem" and Gonzales recalls "severe arguments" between Pablo and Maria, Gonzales told the Academy of Achievement in 2005 that no matter how much his father had to drink, he always woke up for work.

"My father worked six days a week for most of his life, harder than any person I've ever known," Gonzales once said at a White House event.

An excellent student, Gonzales spent his free time goofing off at the construction site where his dad worked and playing baseball with his brothers. Like many children, he had dreams of becoming a pro ball player.

When he was 12 or 13, Gonzales got a job selling soft drinks at Rice University football games.

"And I would watch the students stroll back to the campus, their dorm, and I would dream about what it would be like to be a student there," Gonzales told the Academy of Achievement.

Little did he know he would be attending Rice years later.

After high school, Gonzales joined the Air Force and was stationed at Fort Yukon, Alaska, where the Texas native passed the time playing midnight softball and enjoying the Northern Lights.

There, he met two Air Force Academy graduates who stoked his interest in the lofty military school. In 1975, Gonzales began attending classes, but he struggled with classes like physics and engineering.

After learning his eyesight would never pass pilot muster, Gonzales decided to enroll at Rice, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1979 before going to Harvard Law School. He graduated from Harvard in 1982, the same year his father died.

Gonzales had clerked for Vinson & Elkins while in school and went to work for the firm after graduation. He stayed there 13 years before being lured away by Bush when he was Texas governor.

Solidifying his conservative credentials shortly after joining the White House team in 2001, Gonzales took a shot at affirmative action while conceding it may have gotten him where he is today.

"I know that I've been helped because of my ethnicity," Gonzales told the Los Angeles Times. However, he added, "Hispanics should expect nothing more than an equal opportunity. For us to now say that we should be given an opportunity because of our ethnicity, irrespective of our competence, means that we'll be discriminating against someone else who doesn't happen to be Hispanic."

source: 27aug2007