Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

It’s official: DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine confirmed to the Senate Judiciary Committee that his internal affairs group is investigating his agency’s boss: U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Fine (a Harvard Law School graduate) confirmed that the Inspector General’s office and the Office of Professional Responsibility are investigating the acknowledgment by Monica Goodling under oath that Gonzales spoke with her about her ‘recollection’ of events in the U.S. Attorney firings.

You can read Fine’s letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Leahy and Ranking Member Sen. Arlen Specter (Rep. - Pa.) here:

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.

Glenn Fine, the Justice Department’s Inspector General, just informed the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning that the joint probe launched by his office and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigating the firings of career U.S. Attorneys is expanding.

Other issues that they now “intend to investigate [include] allegations regarding Monica Goodling’s and other’s actions in DOJ hiring and personnel decisions; allegations concerning hiring for the DOJ Honros Program and Law School Intern Program; and allegations concerning hiring practices in the DOJ Civil Rights Divisions.” (Inset, below)

That means the question asked by Gonzales Watch several weeks ago — whether Goodling’s limited grant of immunity would have any affect on the DOJ’s investigation of her — has just been answered. The answer is a resounding “No.”

This should please President Bush, who said at a press conference last week that the “internal investigation taking place at the Justice Department…will be an exhaustive investigation. And if there’s wrongdoing, it will be taken care of.”

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).