Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

Solicitor General Paul D. Clement advised President Bush yesterday that there was no need for him to comply with subpoenas from the House and Senate seeking documents and testimony from current and former White House staff over the U.S. Attorney firings scandal.

“It is my considered legal judgment that you may assert executive privilege over the subpoenaed documents and testimony,” he advised.

Clement’s rejection of the subpoenas match’s White House Counsel Fred Fielding’s rejection of the subpoenas today (Click here to read Fielding’s letter).

Here are the 8-pages of legal advice and reasoning from Clement to Pres. Bush:

Unfortunately, the response was predictable.

The subpoenas that the Senate Judiciary Committee served on the White House, Dick Cheney, National Security Council, and Dept. of Justice were rejected by the White House within less than twenty-four hours.

The Committee’s latest subpoenas were preceded by similar subpoenas that it served on former White House and Justice Department officials:

* A subpoena was issued by the Committee on June 13, 2007 to former White House Counsel Harriet Miers over the U.S. Attorney firings debacle. Miers was givien a July 12, 2007 deadline to comply with the subpoena.

* The Committee served a subpoena on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on May 2, 2007 when he failed to comply with its repeated requests for turning over correspondence (e-mail, etc.) involving White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and his use of non-White House e-mail to conduct goverment business.

The latest legal battle stems from the revelation by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey that Gonzales tried (unsuccessfully) to ram-rod a very ill Attorney General John Ashcroft into extending warrantless domestic surveillance just after Justice Department officials had concluded that it was unconstitutional.

Youc an re-examine Comey’s testimony here:

Tim Griffin, the U.S. Attorney for Arkansas who was White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove’s former adviser, is resigning from his federal prosecutor position effective Friday, June 1, 2007.

Details of Griffin’s politically-charged appointment prompted bipartisan calls in Congress for U.S. Attorney General Gonzales to resign.

That’s because Griffin ‘replaced’ popular and well-respected U.S. Attorney ‘Bud Cummins who was on the list of U.S. Attorneys fired by Gonzales and his DOJ aides on December 7, 2006. The unspoken reasoning behind Cummins’ termination? To make way for a FOK (that’s ‘Friend of Karl’s’).

Griffin worked for the Republican National Commitee as the group’s Research Director and Deputy Communications Director during the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign, and worked as Deputy Research Director for the group during the 2000 presidential campaign.

He graduated from Tulane Law School in New Orleans , Louisiana. As recently as today, the school’s Alumni Affairs division listed Griffin’s directory iinformation on the web for all the world to see as follows (including his non-work e-mail address: griffinjag@earthlink.net and home phone number (inset, below):

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (Dem. - Vt.) and Ranking Member Arlen Specter (Rep. - Penn.) asked Karl Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin yesterday to voluntarily turnover his hard disk(s) and e-mails that were “sent or received using political Republican National Committee accounts.”

In its ongoing investigation of to what extent U.S. Attorney’s were pressured into being political tools of the White House for partisan purposes, the Committee appears to have been stonewalled when it comes to obtaining e-mails thought to have been sent or received by White House Chief of Staff Rove to evade compliance with the Presidential Records Act. That’s the federal law requiring sitting Presidents and their White House staff to keep personal communications and records separate from Presidential records.

Last week this blog reporterd that the Justice Department’s belated response to the Committee’s May 2, 2007 subpoena served upon Attorney General Gonzales seeking Rove’s e-mail communications with the DO turned up “nothing. Nada. Rien. Niente. Zilch. ничего. אפס .لا شي. Nichts. 何も.”

This week’s House Committee on the Judiciary hearing and testimony from former DOJ White House liaison Monica Goodling did not reveal any e-mail communication between Rove and Goodling on U.S. Attorney firings. In fact, Goodling went so far as to testify that she “never had a conversation with Karl Rove or Harriet Miers while I served at the Department of Justice. And I’m certain that I never spoke to either of them about the hiring or firing of any U.S. attorney.”

Speculation and rumor has been rampant on this issue.

What does that mean? Without the ‘teeth’ that a court order mandating Rove to turnover what is essentially electronic discovery with a forensic investigation of Rove’s hard disk, the Committee is simply making nice with opposing counsel. There’s no legal obligation whatsoever for Rove’s lawyer to comply with the Committee’s request. And the Senators know it.

It was a foolish move to make, since it lacks any clout.

The Committee had better hope that Rove, or others working for him, are not using electronic security tools like Evidence Eliminator to get rid of any potentially incriminating, damaging, or questionable material on his RNC-supplied hard drive(s).