Gonzales: going, going, gone?

[deep]

Rohrabacher voices harsh criticism of DoJ, Gonzales
By Klaus Marre
March 16, 2007

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.) on Friday became the latest Republican to strongly criticize the Department of Justice (DoJ) and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, but he stopped short of calling for Gonzales’s resignation.

“It is ultimately the President’s decision but perhaps it would benefit this Administration if the Attorney General was replaced with someone with a more professional focus rather than personal loyalty,” Rohrabacher said.

While the administration’s handling of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys has led Democrats to call for Gonzales’s resignation, the fallout of the growing scandal has also revealed that some Republicans have deep reservations about the attorney general and DoJ on a variety of issues.

For Rohrabacher, one such issue is the case of imprisoned border patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

“There’s been a pattern of arrogance in this Administration,” Rohrabacher said. “They’ve demonstrated contempt for Congressional oversight and now we see a misuse of FBI authority, heavy-handed firings of U.S. Attorneys along with the ruthless prosecutions.

[MrsSpringsteen]

Hazy memories, like the corners of my mind...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House on Friday backed away from its earlier version of whose idea it was to get rid some of the 93 U.S. attorneys, which has grown into a scandal that threatens Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' job.

The White House said previously the idea for sacking federal prosecutors in Bush's second term came from former White House Counsel Harriet Miers, who wanted "new blood" in those offices. Miers became White House counsel after Gonzales moved to the attorney general's office.

But on Friday, White House press secretary Tony Snow said, "It has been described as her idea, but ... I don't want to try to vouch for origination. At this juncture, people have hazy memories."

[zoney!]

I read the title to this thread, and thought it might be about this story:

Off-Duty Baggage Worker Charged With Assault On Flight
NWA Assault Criminal Complaint

(WCCO) Minneapolis An off-duty airline employee was arrested after a woman on a flight from Seattle complained that the man had ejaculated on her.

The FBI identified the man as Samuel Oscar Gonzalez, 20, of Lakewood, Wash. He was charged in federal court with simple assault, a misdemeanor.

It happened on the redeye Monday morning from Seattle to Minneapolis. The woman was headed back to college.

Near the end of the flight, the FBI said Gonzalez sat next to the woman as she was trying to sleep. He touched her, which she described as spooning, lifted her shirt and then got up and left. Court documents said she felt a warm fluid on her back, clothes and seat after he walked away. She told the officers he had ejaculated on her.

The woman told the flight attendants about the incident. They moved her to another seat and called police from the air. The crew also moved the man to a seat near the front of the plane until the end of the flight.

Northwest Airlines Corp. said the flight crew asked that police meet the flight from Seattle when it arrived early Monday in Minneapolis, and that's where officers arrested Gonzalez.

The victim told her boyfriend she was told Gonzalez is a Northwest employee.

"I know she was really upset, just kind of confused about what's going on, what's happening," said the victim's boyfriend, Mark, who asked to be identified only by his first name.

Northwest said that Gonzalez was an equipment service worker, a category that includes baggage handlers, but said he was not working at the time.

They released a statement that said, “The NWA employee has been suspended pending a review of the incident. Northwest is cooperating fully with law enforcement authorities on this matter."

The FBI said Gonzalez was detained after his initial appearance in federal court on Monday. He could face up to six months in jail.

[BVS]

[deep]

Originally posted by zoney!
I read the title to this thread, and thought it might be about this story:

except your Gonzales was not going.... gone.

it seems he was...

.... never mind.

[deep]

I guess Bush is going to keep riding Gonzales all the way down

Perhaps he would like someone else to have lower poll numbers than him.

Bush Aides Worry About Bush's Loyalty to Gonzales

By Paul Bedard
Posted 3/16/07

There is a growing frustration among Republican strategists and even Bush advisers that the president will stick with troubled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales too long, causing damage to him just as his polls appear to be bottoming out.

"I worry that he hangs on to the AG long enough to do maximum damage to himself," said one adviser to the administration and congressional Republicans. A key congressional aide said Republicans fear he will repeat his firing of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which came after the midterm election despite GOP calls for his ouster.

"It's about as frustrating as it was for them to hang on to Rumsfeld and then fire him the day after the election," said the aide. Another GOP adviser said that he had hoped Bush would "act like Bob Gates," the new defense secretary, who cleaned house after the Walter Reed Army Medical Center was hit for bad conditions.

But in keeping Gonzales amid deep concerns in the West Wing over the handling of the firing of federal prosecutors, the adviser said that the president is rekindling the image of incompetence.

"This nicely enhances the Democratic legend that the GOP is both corrupt and incompetent," the adviser said. "I am beginning to wish that Kerry won–at least we would still have Congress. What a crummy lost opportunity this entire second term has become."

[deep]

Note to Gonzales on CIA Prosecution Preceded Firing of U.S. Attorney

By Chitra Ragavan
Posted 3/19/07

On May 11, 2006, Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, sent a confidential E-mail to the White House counsel's office regarding the "removal and replacement" of U.S. attorneys whose four-year terms had expired, including the U.S. attorney in San Diego, Carol Lam: "The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam," Sampson wrote, "that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires."

So what was the "real problem" that Sampson thought the administration had with Lam?

U.S. News has learned that on May 10, one day before Sampson's E-mail to the White House counsel's office, the U.S. attorney's office in San Diego alerted the Justice Department that the FBI would execute search warrants in two days for the No. 3 official at the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, in connection with the spiraling corruption probe into former Republican Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham of California.

Now Democratic members of Congress want to know whether that alert triggered Sampson's E-mail and whether Lam's firing and those of seven other federal prosecutors were politically motivated. Sampson's E-mail, sent one day after the alert, raises serious questions as to whether the CIA tried to intervene in a politically charged investigation and tried to get Lam fired.

In politically sensitive cases, the U.S. attorney's office notifies senior Justice Department leadership of developments in the case by sending what's known as an urgent report.

In this case, the U.S. attorney in San Diego sent an urgent report to Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty at 10:16 a.m. on May 10, notifying them of the imminent search. Foggo was under investigation for allegedly accepting gifts and favors from his best friend, a defense contractor named Brent Wilkes, who also allegedly was bribing Cunningham. Wilkes had close ties to prominent Republicans. Both Wilkes and Foggo have since been indicted by a federal grand jury on corruption charges. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Although the FBI had worked closely with the CIA in connection with targeting CIA spies like Aldrich Ames, never in the agency's history had such a search warrant been issued against such a high-level CIA official for nonespionage criminal conduct.

[deep]

Originally posted by deep


i don't think so



it could be next friday, though

he very well may not make it to friday


they really can not claim executive privilage for him

they can make a case for Rove and Myers

White House Seeking Gonzales Replacements

By: Mike Allen
March 19, 2007 07:24 PM EST


Republican officials operating at the behest of the White House have begun seeking a possible successor to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose support among GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill has collapsed, according to party sources familiar with the discussions.

Among the names floated Monday by administration officials are Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and White House anti-terrorism coordinator Frances Townsend. Former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson is a White House prospect. So is former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, but sources were unsure whether he would want the job

[Diemen]

Imagine the media feeding frenzy if Chertoff got the nomination...

[deep]

White House Offers to Make Rove, Miers Available for Interview in Attorneys Probe



By PETE YOST and LARA JAKES JORDAN

WASHINGTON Mar 20, 2007 (AP)— The White House offered Tuesday to make political strategist Karl Rove and former counsel Harriet Miers available for interviews but not testimony under oath before congressional committees investigating the firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, said he would still press for White House aides to testify under oath, saying that White House counsel Fred Fielding "indicated he didn't want to negotiate" whether Rove and others would have to appear in a full hearing. "That doesn't mean we're not going to try," Schumer said.

The White House move was announced after the Senate voted overwhelmingly to end the Bush administration's ability to unilaterally fill U.S. attorney vacancies. That had come as a backlash to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' firing of the prosecutors.

Gonzales got a morale boost with an early-morning call from President Bush, their first conversation since a week ago, when the president said he was unhappy with how the Justice Department handled the firings.

The White House offered to arrange interviews with Rove, Miers, deputy White House counsel William Kelley and J. Scott Jennings, a deputy to White House political director Sara Taylor, who works for Rove.

"Such interviews would be private and conducted without the need for an oath, transcript, subsequent testimony, or the subsequent issuance of subpoenas," Fielding said in a letter to the chairman of the House and Senate judiciary committees.

[Diemen]

Good grief. How transparent is that?

Yes, you can question them. But they don't have to be honest in their answers. And nothing they say can be held against them.

Boy, what a deal!

[deep]

It worked for the 911 panel.

[BVS]

How many Bush apointees or staff have "resigned" or been fired? Does he hold a record?

[MrsSpringsteen]

Subpoenas

WASHINGTON (AP) - A House panel on Wednesday approved subpoenas for President Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove and other top White House aides, setting up a constitutional showdown over the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

By voice vote, the House Judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law decided to compel the president's top aides to testify publicly and under oath about their roles in the firings.

[Diemen]

Good. I was afraid the Dems were going to cave to the "interviews."

[deep]

Conservatives to Bush: Fire Gonzales
Monday, Apr. 16, 2007 By ADAM ZAGORIN/WASHINGTON


In what could prove an embarrassing new setback for embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the eve of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a group of influential conservatives and longtime Bush supporters has written a letter to the White House to call for his resignation.

The two-page letter, written on stationery of the American Freedom Agenda, a recently formed body designed to promote conservative legal principles, is blunt. Addressed to both Bush and Gonzales, it goes well beyond the U.S. attorneys controversy and details other alleged failings by Gonzales. "Mr. Gonzales has presided over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution's time-honored checks and balances," it declares. "He has brought rule of law into disrepute, and debased honesty as the coin of the realm." Alluding to ongoing scandal, it notes: "He has engendered the suspicion that partisan politics trumps evenhanded law enforcement in the Department of Justice."

The letter concludes by saying, "Attorney General Gonzales has proven an unsuitable steward of the law and should resign for the good of the country... The President should accept the resignation, and set a standard to which the wise and honest might repair in nominating a successor..." It is the first public demand by a group of conservatives for Gonzales' firing. Signatories to the letter include Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Reagan Justice Department, who has worked frequently with current Administration and the Republican National Committee to promote Bush's court nominees; David Keene, chairman of the influential American Conservative Union, one of the nation's oldest and largest grassroots conservative groups; Richard Viguerie, a well-known G.O.P. direct mail expert and fundraiser; and Bob Barr, the former Republican Congressman from Georgia and free speech advocate, as well as John Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, a conservative non-profit active in fighting for what it calls religious freedoms.

Fein, speaking for the signatories, told TIME that Gonzales' planned testimony to Congress tomorrow, the text of which has been released by the Justice Department, was a "terrible disappointment" that left unanswered key questions on which his job may now depend. "Gonzales' testimony before the Judiciary Committee resorts to a truly Clintonesque defense of his own previous false statements," says Fein. "In fact," he says, "Gonzales' latest declarations really do call into question the forthrightness and honesty indispensable for America's chief law enforcement officer."

Signers of the letter says that it is also aimed at fellow Republicans — and especially G.O.P. members of Congress — whom they hope to encourage to call for the Attorney General's ouster, a step they argue is crucial to ending damage to the Department of Justice, as well as G.O.P. standing on Capitol Hill.

[verte76]

Ooh, that's damning.

[Diemen]

But he serves at the pleasure of the President.






Isn't it odd how you only hear that said when someone's done something wrong/illegal?

[deep]

I don't know if any one is watching the C Span sessions

but this guy is not coming off well at all


it seems like some of the GOP are trying to throw him lifelines

but, they are coming up with different excuses for him

there are some GOP that are implying that he may be a decent guy
but, perhaps not the right man for this job

[Irvine511]

Originally posted by deep
there are some GOP that are implying that he may be a decent guy
but, perhaps not the right man for this job

sounds like Brownie.

but not quite like Rummy.