Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

White House Deputy Spokesperson Dana Perino should get a ‘Quote of the Day’ award for her description of a condition for keeping an executive branch position serving President Bush.

Answering a reporter’s query about whether Bush’s support for Attorney General Gonzales “remain[s] contingent in some way on how Gonzales performs during his [upcoming] testimony on Capitol Hill,” Perino reminded Americans that:

“[we] serve at the pleasure of the President, if we fail to continue to keep the
President’s pleasure, then we no longer work here..”

A new litmus test for Executive appointees: do you “keep the President’s pleasure?”

The U.S. Attorney’s former Chief of Staff, D. Kyle Sampson, testified before a rapt Senate Judiciary Committee today about the U.S. Attorney firings scandal.

According to Sampson, Gonzales was involved in the decision-making and firings process: “The decision-makers in this case were the attorney general and the counsel to the president,” he responded to one Committee member’s question.

Unless he can clear convincingly clear up the discrepancies, Gonzales’ March 13th assertion that he “I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood” vis à vie U.S. Attorney firings has been shown by Sampson and DOJ e-mail not to be true. Gonzales remains caught in a pack of his own lies.

The former DOJ Chief of Staff employee’s testimony today, combined with e-mails released by the DOJ, strongly suggest that Gonzales has not been telling the truth to Congress and the American public.

Sampson testified: “I remember discussing with [Attorney General Gonzales] this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign, and I believe that he was present at the meeting on Nov. 27.”

Sampson’s November 21, 2006 e-mail has Gonzales meeting with six of his key aides in the “AG’s conference room” for an hour on Monday, November 27, 2006 to discuss “U.S. Attorney appointments,” i.e., the planned firing and replacement of the eight U.S. Attorneys who were termianted:

Gonzales has adamently denied this charge.

You can read Sampson’s prepared statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee here.

On Tuesday this blog predicted that Gonzales was having sit downs with U.S. Attorneys during his week-long national sexual predator awareness public awareness campaign.

Now the New York Times reports in Thursday’s edition that this was exactly what the Attorney General was doing:

While Mr. Gonzales’s trip was part of a long-scheduled tour, he has been meeting in recent days with prosecutors in an effort to repair the damage caused by the dismissals.

Gonzales met with U.S. Attorneys from Western states while in Denver.  In Chicago he met with Patrick Fitzgerald, Special Prosecutor of Scoober Libby fame and Chicago U.S. Attorney. Also in attendance, the Times reports, were “Steven M. Biskupic and Erik C. Peterson of Wisconsin; Joseph S. Van Bokkelen of Indiana; Craig S. Morford of Tennessee; and James A. McDevitt of Washington State.”