Heading For The Wall

by Steve

So now it’s time for a no-confidence vote on Alberto? Why not talk openly about impeachment of the AG?

There are numerous reasons for the GOP to be scared right now about their unwavering support of this administration. Earlier this week, I noted that four Democratic senators noticed the discrepancy between Alberto Gonzales’s previous testimony about the Ashcroft bedside incident and James Comey’s accounting of it this week. Laura Rozen and others speculated sagely that there may not have been a discrepancy if in fact Comey shed light on a domestic and unauthorized FBI-run component of the NSA’s questionable Terrorism Surveillance Program. Now confirmation of that seems to come from the DOJ itself, which says that Gonzales won’t retract his earlier carefully choreographed testimony, because he was indicating that there was no internal disagreements about the TSP.

This comes as the Justice Department tells the Senate Judiciary Committee that it can only find one email from Rove on his role in the attorney sackings, yet pushes the Senate off to Rove’s attorney, which should raise some eyebrows. It also comes after Rove’s former aide Susan Ralston, with direct ties back to her former employer Jack Abramoff, suddenly wants immunity after she gave a deposition. She claims she has nothing that would damage Rove. Do you believe that?

The problem for Gonzales is that he and Bush already have a credibility problem with Congress on the federal attorney sackings, where Hagel, Pat Roberts and other GOP senators now want Gonzales gone or predict he will resign for misleading them on the scope of the sackings originally planned, many of course in political battleground states. Beyond that though, as Jonathan Turley noted, the revelations from Comey confirm that the president condoned an unauthorized and illegal domestic spying program, which is an impeachable offense. The White House knows they are on very shaky ground now, as evidenced by Bush’s tap dance today. Glenn Greenwald states clearly that what we have here is a president who condoned an illegal domestic spying program for over two years that was so egregious that his own Justice Department hierarchy and FBI director threatened to resign over it. Yet Bush went ahead with it anyway, and then dumped Ashcroft after the election and solved his problem by appointing Gonzales to bury any threats of such illegality seeing the light of day while Bush was in office in the hope that they could ride it out for 4 years.

And then came the unforeseen 2006 midterm result. The Bush Administration may have finally hit the rocks this week, especially when both the Bush-enabling Post and the NYT now want to know what illegal activity Bush authorized for those 2 ½ years that we are just now finding out about.