Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

Peter Keisler, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, gave 2-weeks notice today that he’s resigning.

Keisler is one of three Bush appointees who were accused by Sharon Y. Eubanks, the DOJ’s former lead tobacco racketeering prosecution lawyer of interfering with the government’s prosecution of the case against Big Tobacco.

According to an account that Eubanks gave the Washington Post, Keisler and two other Bush appointees only took an interest in her team’s civil racketeering case against tobacco companies “when it became clear that the government might win.”

Before being appointed by Bush, Keilser was a litigator at Sidley Austin, LLP, and served as Assistant Counsel and then Associate Counsel in the White House under former President Ronald Reagan.

Keisler was nominated by President Bush to be a federal appellate judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is still pending.

Given the allegations made against him by Eubanks concerning the huge penalty changes in the government’s settlement with tobacco companies — the $130B in civil penalties were reduced to just $10B after Keisler and his colleagues reportedly made Eubanks rewrite her closing arguments — his nomination is sure to be hotly contested before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In the end, Alberto Gonzales’ lapdog loyalty to his boss was his greatest downfall, not only for the Attorney General, but for the administration that he was brought in to serve.

That is what Gonzales’ resignation has taught the country.

The country’s top lawyer never proved himself to be an independent thinker. Gonzales is a sycophant, a yes-man to sign off on President Bush’s legal policies.

The Washington Post emphasizes that “realities trumped loyalty” when the White House and GOP could not halt bi-partisan attacks over politically-motivated firings of U.S. Attorneys, and absence of real leadership inside the Justice Department.

In the end, there is only one lapdog that President Bush can still call upon for true loyalty: his name is Barney.

New York Times Washington correspondent Philip Shenon has a terrific video piece on Attorney General Gonzales’ resignation from the “Texas Mafia.”

Shenon explains that this described “the small group of aides that Bush brought with him to Washington from Texas.” In addition to Gonzales, that group also included another Texas lawyer: former White House Counsel Harriet Miers.

There’s an urgent problem created by Alberto Gonzales’ litany of controversies while serving as U.S. Attorney General and White House Counsel to President Bush.

Will Gonzales’ inability to testify truthfully before Congress, attempts to circumvent the Justice Department’s legal conclusion under former Attorney General John Ashcroft that warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional, and continued lack of Congressional support for firing career criminal prosecutors in U.S. Attorney offices around the country have a catastrophic affect on America’s ability to collect vital intelligence on terrorists and others threatening the U.S. domestically and abroad?

These questions come to mind after reading today’s Washington Post article on efforts by Mike McConnell, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence to get Congress to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (’FISA’) (50 U.S.C. § 1801, et al.

In effect, McConnell appears like he’s trying to ‘pull a Gonzales’ by circumventing the federal judiciary. The changes that he is proposing to Congress for the current FISA law, according to the Post, are of a logistical nature, and raise the following question: “When communications between one foreign-located source and another foreign-located source travel through a U.S.-located terminal or switch, can they be intercepted without a warrant?”

Here are a few hypothetical scenarios that come to mind:

• If potential targets of a terrorism investigation use Skype (which is owned by San Jose, Calif.-based eBay), could the U.S. eavesdrop on VoIP phone calls or text communications simply because the parent company is a U.S.-based entity?
• If VoIP servers used in foreign communications by terrorists are located overseas, would the U.S. still have jurisdiction to eavesdrop on the communication(s) without first obtaining a court-ordered warrant?
• If an al Qaeda terrorist called from a satellite phone in the tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan to a member of a terrorist cell in a country outside of the United States, could the U.S. legally eavesdrop on the conversation and use information collected from to act against the parties when their communication, locations, and systems used were all overseas?

Convicted 9/11 conspirator and admitted al Qaeda terrorist Zarias Moussaoui used Hotmail accounts to help carry out part of his intended operation, according to court documents and news reports in the case.

If he had used a overseas e-mail account instead of his Hotmail account hosted by Microsoft, would McConnell’s proposed changes in the law have enabled U.S. intelligence agencies to legally collect and used information garnered from his communications (the FBI reportedly bungled their collection and use of Moussaoui’s Hotmail e-mails.)?