Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

Now that the Justice Department’s Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility (’OPR’) are expanding their internal probe beyond U.S. Attorney firings to include investigating hiring practices of Monica Goodling and others, it’s worth another look back at last year’s fight between OPR Chief H. Marshall Jarrett, Attorney General Gonzales, and the White House.

Jarrett has served as OPR’s Chief Counsel and Director since 1998 when then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed to the position in the Clinton Administration. Jarrett was a career prosecutor — not a political hack — and has been a Department of Justice employee for more than 32 years.

According to a report by CBS News, Jarrett duked it out with Gonzales and President Bush. in the spring of 2006 when he was stonewalled while investigating the role of Justice Department attorneys in creating the warrantless surveillance progam authorizing NSA to conduct domestic surveillance.

Memos from Jarreett to “Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, in February, March and April of [2006],” CBS reported, “show that while Gonzales publicly told the Senate that OPR was investigating, Jarrett was complaining to higher-ups that he was “unable to move forward” because of the lack of security clearances for himself and six staff members.”

Two weeks ago former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified that in 2004 Gonzales tried to push renewal of a domestic surveillance bill past then Attorney General John Ashcroft after Ashcroft and Comey had already concluded that a warrantless domestic surveillance program was unconstititonal.

Given Jarrett’s battles with Ashcroft and President Bush over these highly controversial legal moves in the past, it would appear that his record as a career prosecutor — and not a political hack — will serve this investigation well.