Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

A new report being released by the FBI on Monday confirms that violent crime increased every year since Alberto Gonzales became U.S. Attorney General.

The Washington Post’s Dan Eggen writes that “[t]he FBI’s Uniform Crime Report will show an increase of about 1.3 percent in violent offenses last year, including a 6 percent rise in robberies and a slight rise in homicides, according to law enforcement officials, who described key findings in advance of the report’s release. That follows an increase of 2.3 percent in 2005, which was the first significant increase in violent crime in 15 years.”

This shows that since Gonzales became Attorney General on February 3, 2005, his tenure in office has not stemmed violent crime, but rather increased it during his management at the Department of Justice. This suggests that Gonzales’ reply to Republican Senator Tom Coburn’s call for his resignation at the April 19 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing lacked credibility. At the time, Gonzales said that “the department under my leadership has done some great things.” The report being released on Monday June 4, 2007 should make clear that one of those things was not reducing violent crime

Given recent bipartisan calls for Gonzales’ resignation, he is sure to face even more bipartisan criticism from Congress about these sobering new crime statistics.

The strongest criticism at today’s Senate hearing early this afternoon came from Sen. Tom Coburn (Rep. - Okla.) (inset) when told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales directly that he should resign.

Coburn was outraged that Gonzales refused to give the eight fired U.S. Attorneys reasons for their being fired from their jobs.

Gonzales’ response? “As a legal matter, they’re not entitled to” have reasons for losing their jobs. He beleives that any mistakes he made were “moral,” not legal. “One of the things I would have done would have been to be more respectful,” he explained, and done a better job of communicating with U.S. Attorneys.

It’s the Attorney General’s stock “Cool Hand Luke” defense admitting that he’s had a big problem with failing to communicate effectively with U.S. Atorneys.

“Why would we not use the same standards to judge your performance as we did to judge those dismissed U.S. Attorneys?” Coburn continued.

Gonzales refused to answer the question, even after it was repeated several times. Instead he resorted to several of his standard rebuffs to questions that put him in a defensive position, saying either: “I think that’s a fair question,” or that “the department under my leadership has done some great things.”

A classic negotiation strategy that many litigators are familiar with: attempt to diffuse the conflict by acknowledging the interrogators concerns, show some level of acceptance of responsibility for errors, and then site one’s accomplishments.