Following on from Alberto Gonzales' op-ed in the Washington Post today, TPM Muckraker has posted the relevant sections of his written statement for Tuesday's hearing, which was provided today to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In summary, Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy writes that the testimony will amount to a simple admission that he had no idea what was really going on. "Gonzales was basically out of the loop on who would be fired and why. Gonzales told Sampson to make up a list, and Gonzales approved Sampson's list a year or two later without asking about or getting into the details."
So Gonzales will throw already-resigned scapegoat Sampson under a bus as the real culptrit (at the DoJ at least) while describing himself as an idiot for thinking Sampson would do a competent job without becoming Rove's patsy and for later taking Sampson's word as good enough without adequately reviewing Sampson's work. A manager as awful as Gonzales admits himself to be should be fired if he won't resign - his only possible plus point being that this managerial awfullness appears to be exactly what Rove was counting on.
Marty Lederman gets to the real root of the matter.
It is increasingly plain that he didn't act for much of a reason at all, other than that he was presented with a list of names that had already been cleared with Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. His previous statements that he was more-or-less out of the loop, in other words, are likely to be basically accurate. He didn't fundamentally mislead Congress. His role in this imbroglio was as the rubber-stamper.
...this was a White House -- not a DOJ -- initiative, and its function was to remove U.S. Attorneys who were not acceptable to the President and his advisers. It makes sense, in that light, that Kyle Sampson would work closely with the White House on the process, and that the Attorney General would be inclined to go along with the White House's final decisions if he were satsified that there was a solid basis for them. So far, so good -- and it wouldn't be terribly out of the ordinary, either, except that it's increasingly clear that this was part of a much more extensive Rovian White House operation to use the mechanisms of government to skew elections to Republicans...[via] the elaborate fiction of widespread "voter fraud," which has not only been the predicate for the enactment of numerous disenfranchising voter ID laws, and the pretext for stopping much-needed voter-registration reforms, but has also resulted in in terrorem prosecutions by the Department of Justice on trivial or trumped-up charges.
...the real action on the "merits" was not at DOJ, but in the White House, where the process was initiated by Karl Rove and where the final decision was made by the President. Thus, the current focus on the Attorney General is something of a distraction, at least insofar as Congress's objective is to determine whether anything unlawful or unconstitutional was involved in the U.S. Attorney dismissals. Congress cannot determine whether the removals were made for improper reasons unless it discovers what Rove and Miers advised the President, and why they did so. But the evidence that would bear on that is precisely the sorts of internal White House deliberations that Fred Fielding would put off-limits to Congress -- or that have magically disappeared from RNC databases.
Update Josh Marshall wants you to pay attention to this - "the available evidence now points strongly to the conclusion that the final decision to fire David Iglesias came from the President of the United States."
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