Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

Despite weeks of preparation and canceling Spring Break family vacation plans, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales showed he was thoroughly unprepared to convince members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he could tell the truth about his knowledge and level of involvement in the U.S. Attorney firings scandal.

Gonzales’ standard reply to questions asking for more detail in the controversy was simply, “I can’t recall.”  This was his response, or variations of it, according to USA Today (71 times) and The Washington Post (64 times).  One keen observer at the hearing even kept a running count of the Attorney General’s “I Don’t Recall” answers.

Other Gonzales pat replies included “that’s a fair question,” and “that’s a fair statement,” suggesting that observers should respect the analytical abilities of an executive agency head who can’t remember conversationas and details about why career prosecutors were fired.

Few observers came away from the hearing respecting Gonzales’ analytical abilities — none appeared to be present.

From former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie and former Deputy White House Counsel Timothy Flanigan reportedly helped Gonzales prepare for yesterday’s hearing by putting him through mock testimony.

Gonzales stuck to the sound bite that his handlers crafted for the Attorney General’s Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, and his prepared testimony before the Committee: he did “nothing improper.”

If the country’s top law enforcement officer was thoroughly unprepared and incapable of delivering truthful, candid responses to Congress, how can he be expected to run the Department of Justice in anything more than a dysfunctional manner?

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had hoped to convince members of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that he did “nothing improper.”  He failed miserably.

Republican and Democratic Senators pounded Gonzlaes with question after question — most of which he failed to answer credibly.

A month ago, this law blog wrote that Gonzales was “caught in a pack of lies” for his contradictory statements about what he knew about the process of firing U.S. Attorneys, and when he knew it.

Yesterday, it became clear that (with the exception of Sen. Orin Hatch), nearly all members of the Committee did not believe he was testifying truthfully under oath.

He did not recollect details of an hour-long November 27, 2006 meeting in the Attorney General’s own conference room at the Justice Department with senior aides to discuss the firing and replacement of U.S. Attorneys.

He engaged of a pattern of trying to deflect questions, rather than answer them. And most members of the Committee called for his resignation, the most direct and forceful of these calls coming from GOP Senator Coburn.

Gonzales could be out of the Justice Department before the end of the month.