Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (Dem. - Vt.) and Ranking Member Arlen Specter (Rep. - Penn.) sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today requesting that he provide the Committee with follow-up answers to all questions about the U.S. Attorney firings for which he testified he “could not recall” details.

Gonzales is scheduled to testify in two weeks on May 10th before the House Judiciary Committee. Any answers that Gonzales gives to the Senate Judiciary before then could help sharpen questions and clarify testimony in advance of the House hearing.

Below is the full text of the letter sent to Gonzales today from Senators Leahy and Specter:

April 25, 2007

The Honorable Alberto Gonzales
Attorney General
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Attorney General Gonzales:

As part of the Committee’s investigation into the replacement of U.S. Attorneys, we are writing to ask you to promptly supplement your testimony of April 19 with answers to those questions for which you responded that you could not recall or did not know. We ask that you submit this supplemental information within a week.

You spent weeks preparing for the April 19th hearing. Yet during your testimony, in response to questions from Senators on both sides of the aisle, you often responded that you could not recall. By some counts you failed to answer more than 100 questions, by other counts more than 70, but the most conservative count had you failing to provide answers well over 60 times. As a result, the Committee’s efforts to learn the truth of why and how these dismissals took place, and the role you and other Department and White House officials had in them, has been hampered.

The questions asked by Senators should not have been a surprise. You were alerted in letters to you well in advance of last Thursday’s hearing. By letter sent April 4, you were asked to include in your written testimony a “full and complete account of the development of the plan to replace Untied States Attorneys, and all the specifics of your role in connection with that matter.” That account was not included in your written testimony nor in your answers to questions at the hearing. You were also alerted in advance of the hearing, by a letter sent on April 13, that you would be asked about information derived from the staff interviews of your senior aides. You were, nevertheless, unprepared to answer those questions.

We believe the Committee and our investigation would benefit from you searching and refreshing your recollection and your supplementing your testimony by next Friday to provide the answers to the questions you could not recall last Thursday.

Sincerely,

PATRICK LEAHY
Chairman

ARLEN SPECTER
Ranking Member

Sara Taylor, the White House Director of Political Affairs (inset, left), may be compelled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the U.S. Attorney firings investigation.

According to the Washington Post, she “reports to senior adviser Karl Rove and her name has appeared on several e-mails released by the Justice Department in which White House and Justice officials discuss planning for the firings.”

The Committee suspects that Taylor is a key link to uncovering more details in the U.S. Attorney firings scandal because of her work with Rove. E-mails reportedly reveal that “Taylor’s office was keenly interested in securing the appointment of former Rove deputy Tim Griffin to be the U.S. Attorney for Little Rock,” and that Justice Department officials “planned to circumvent senatorial confirmation for Griffin by using a now revoked power to appoint interim prosecutors for indefinite periods– something Gonzales had previously assured [Arkansas Senator Mark] Pryor he was not trying to do.

The House Committee on the Judiciary authorized a grant of immunity today for Monica Goodling (inset), in exchange for testimony from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former Senior Counsel and DOJ liasion to the White House.

A two-thirds vote by Committee members was required in order for immunity to be granted. 32 Committee members voted in favor of granting Goodling immunity, six voted against and two were not present.

The former senior Justice Department official was granted what is called “limited use immunity,” for testifying before a Congressional proceeding under 18 U.S.C. § 6005.

Legally speaking, the immunity isn’t automatic. The House General Counsel will need to go before a federal judge in the U.S. District Court to get an order that formally gives Goodling immunity.

As Attorney General, Gonzales could try to delay immunity for Goodling. Federal law allows the attorney general ask the court to “defer the issuance of any order” for “not longer than twenty days from the date of the request for such order.” That is done to give the DOJ an opporunity to advise Committee whether or not giving Goodling immunity would interfere with any ongoing or expected criminal investigation that she may have been involved with at the Department.

Gonzales continues to maintain that he’s done “nothing improper” in firing the career prosecutors, despite the bipartisan bashing he received at last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

President Bush continues to say that Gonzales has his full support, telling reporters after the hearing that he’s “an honest, honorable man, in whom I have confidence.”

It appears that the President must have seen a different recording of last week’s Judiciary Committee hearing than the rest of the country. Bush said that when Gonzales testified, he “answered every question he could possibly answer, honestly answer, in a way that increased my confidence in his ability to do the job.” Did he hear the 64 or 70+ times that Gonzales said he could not recall specifics of his participation in, and knowledge of, the process of firing U.S. Attorneys? Apparently not.

Why Goodling’s Testimony Could Be Imporant
Goodling was present at the Nov. 27, 2007 meeting in the Attorney General’s conference room where Gonzales and his most senior aides met to discuss the planned firings of U.S. Attorneys.

The House and Senate Judiciary Committee repeatedly sought Goodling’s sworn testimony in its investigation of the U.S. Attorney firings controversy.

This is a huge victory for Goodling’s lawyerJohn Dowd, a noted D.C. white collar criminal defense attorney. He’s repeatedly invoked his client’s Fifth Amendment right not to testify.

Earlier, he slammed Senate and House Judiciary Committee member tactics, saying that they smacked of McCarthyism by assuming that his client was hiding something, when under the Constitution, she is presumed innocent of any wrongdoing.