The current short-list for nominees for Attorney General

According to TPM Election Central, Roll Call offers its short list of potential nominees for the job of Attorney General.

• Former Solicitor General Ted Olson


• Former Attorney General Bill Barr and also Bio of Bill Barr from Forbes


• Former Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger III


• D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman


• Former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson


• Michael Mukasey, a former judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Roll Call supposedly offers bios of these guys, but Roll Call is Subscription only, so I am linking to wikipedia and a few other sources of biographical data on these people.

The coming battle over Gonzales' replacement

We are at the moment waiting for the official announcement of Albert Gonzales' resignation as U.S. Attorney General.

There is going to be a big battle over his replacement. Bush is going to try to appoint someone who will attempt to apply conservative ideology in the way I just described in my post "Conservatism failed? Do it again with twice the effort. (Failure assured.)" This will be the conservative ideologue who will be supported by the Republican Party and a few conservative Democrats.

The Democrats will demand a replacement who will enforce the law and the Constitution rather than enforce conservative ideology.

No one can satisfy both requirements.

NPR just speculated that the two current front running choices are Michael Chertoff, presently Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Paul D. Clement, currently Department of Justice Solicitor General.

Both are conservative ideologues before they are lawyers. Neither is likely to actually investigate the warrantless wiretaps or the reasons why the US Attorneys were purged on Pearl Harbor Day, 2006. If they follow the Bush administration tradition they will lie to the Senate (as did Justices Alito and Roberts) and then do as they wish

Two other possible names according to Daniel Metcalf (interviewed on NPR) are Sen. Orrin Hatch and ex-Sen. John Danforth. Metcalf suggests that each has an "in" for confirmation by the Senate since they are both members of the Senate club. The drawback for Sen. Hatch is that he has been a vigorous, but that Sen. Hatch has has spent a great deal of his legitimacy by defending Gonzales so strongly. Ex-Sen. Danforth, as a confirmed Episcopal Priest, should be able to politically get past the problems created by Gonzales' many "I don't know"'s and misleading statements to the Senate during hearings.

There will be other names floated in the near future.

Of course, there is also the problem of the jelly-spined Democrats currently dominating Washington D.C. They will try to get binding commitments from whoever the nominee is. Will they hear what they want to hear and roll over?

Still, the only place the Bush administration is going to be able to effectively push their idea of conservatism is in foreign policy. That means that America can expect to see more self-destructive foreign policy initiatives over the next 17 months.

I do predict that Bush 43 will start something risky and ill-advised in foreign policy after the November 2008 election and hand it off to his successor. That is what Eisenhower did with the Bay of Pigs, handing it off the John Kennedy, and it is what Bush 41 did with his actions in Somalia in 1992, handing that mess off the Bill Clinton.

NY Times reports Gonzales has resigned; Good riddance

More Bush administration housecleaning as August comes to a close. The New York Times has just reported:

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WACO, Tex., Aug. 27 — ­ Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.

Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the Attorney General's resignation had not yet been made public.

Mr. Bush had repeatedly stood by Mr. Gonzales, an old friend and colleague from Texas, even as he faced increasing scrutiny for his leadership of the Justice Department, including his role in the dismissals of nine United States attorneys late last year and questions about whether he testified truthfully about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. [Snip]

Mr. Gonzales's resignation is the latest in a series of high-level departures that has reshaped the end of Mr. Bush's second term. Karl Rove, another of Mr. Bush's close circle of aides from Texas, stepped down two weeks ago.

The official said that the decision was Mr. Gonzales's and that the president accepted it grudgingly. At the same time, the official acknowledged that the turmoil over his tenure as Attorney General had made continuing difficult.

"The unfair treatment that he's been on the receiving end of has been a distraction for the department," the official said.

OK. So Karen Hughes left long ago, and Karl Rove just resigned. Less well-known are Harriet Miers and Dan Bartlett who have also left.

Does Dick Cheney count as part of the Texas take-over? He was, of course, a resident of Dallas, TX in 2000 but transferred his voting residence back to Montana to avoid the problem that the Constitution does not allow the President and Vice President to both be from the same state.

It's good to see Gonzales go. America is much better for his resignation.

Attorney General Gonzales: Lying or bad memory?

The Washington Post has decided to publish an article on one of the burning questions today rolling through and over the city of Washington D.C.

Whether Gonzales has deliberately told untruths or is merely hampered by his memory has been the subject of intense debate among members of Congress, legal scholars and others who have watched him over the years. Some regard his verbal difficulties as a strategic ploy on behalf of a president to whom he owes his career; others see a public official overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibilities. [Snip]

Gonzales told senators earlier this year that allegations that he had been untruthful "have been personally very painful to me." But Gonzales's critics on and off Capitol Hill say he has had trouble with the truth for more than a decade, pointing to a controversy over Gonzales's account of why Bush was excused from jury duty in 1996 while serving as the governor of Texas.

The article does a lot of reporting on what has been said by both Gonzales' supporters and his detractors, so there is a lot of "On the one hand... then on the other hand..." type statements. But it is very difficult to conclude that the Truth can be found by taking the arguments from both sides and splitting the difference. Consider his history.

Alberto Gonzales spent, two years at the Air Force Academy, then resigned and went on to graduate from the single finest University in Texas, Rice University of Houston. Then he went on to get a law degree from Harvard, joined one of the top law firms in Texas (Vinson and Elkins) where he became a partner. This is not the career pattern of a man with memory and verbal problems.

...scrutiny of Gonzales increased dramatically this year as a result of Democrats' aggressive investigations into the Justice Department's firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. Gonzales has particularly come under fire for his shifting explanations of his role in the dismissals and for his statements that he could not recall a host of details about the firings.

At a Senate hearing in April, for example, Gonzales said more than 60 times that he could not recall events or facts related to the firings, including a final, high-level meeting in his office at which the dismissal plan was formally approved.

Lying successfully requires an excellent memory and a thorough understanding of whatever is being lied about. Without knowing what is really going on, good lies cannot be crafted that do not give themselves away through contradictions. Gonzales does not appear to have been caught in any extremely obvious personal contradiction, though a lot of people have come forward to disagree with his statements. If he is lying, then he is carefully preparing to lie by making sure that he has plausible deniability for most of what he says. Again this strongly suggests that his errors in testimony are intentional, not accidental or the result of a memory or verbal impairment.

Did he suffer some mental disease such as Alzheimer's since then? He left Vinson and Elkins in 1994 to become Bush's General Counsel when Bush was elected Governor of Texas and he is now age 51. If he has some memory or verbal problem which has developed since 1994 it has only become noticeable when he walked into the Senate for hearings after he was confirmed to the job of Attorney General.

There is an attempt to pass the problems off by saying that "Gonzales's strengths 'may lie elsewhere, but they are not in management.'" While Attorneys are notoriously poor managers, and Gonzales has clearly demonstrated that his management skills lie in the low range for that profession, his statements to the Senate are a result of his strengths as one of the better Attorneys in the nation acting to give testimony. It is much more likely that he has structured his job in order to make what he says to Congress more credible or more difficult to disprove than it is that he is a poor manager.

Or to say it another way, he may be a poor manager, but it is because he has structured his job to provide that as an excuse for those lies he gets caught in rather than poor management being the reason for his refusal to tell the truth to Congress. It takes an extremely bright, competent and well-trained attorney to build a large structure of lies and then build - on top of that structure - systems of plausible deniability.

His only remaining excuse might be mental illness. But if that is the case, it demonstrates itself only when he sits in the Senate witness chair. I don't think that medicine has identified a Senate-specific memory or verbal illness. I see no way to draw any conclusion other than that he is lying to protect himself and Bush.

Did AG Gonzales lie to Congress yesterday?

Let's look at the Hearings yesterday and see if how badly AG Gonzales lied yesterday.

Here is a set of highlight from the Hearings, put together by Talking Points Memo.

Then Spencer Ackerman provides a discussion of his "missteps" in yesterday's testimony.

One point that AG Gonzales made when discussing his attempt to explain why he was in Ashcroft's hospital room trying to get him to override the decision (even though Ashcroft was under the influence of sedating drugs at the time) of the temporary Attorney General Ashcroft had appointed before he entered the hospital. Gonzales blamed his actions (this time) on a meeting with Congressional leaders (the Gang of Eight) who were anxious to have the classified programming doing spying on Americans without a warrant. Rep. Jane Harmon (CA-D) was a member of the Gang of Eight and claims that Gonzales was lying.

Ex-New Mexico US attorney David Iglesias is not happy

David Iglesian, ex-US attorney of New Mexico, tells his story in an OpEd in the New York Times.

WITH this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters. [Snip}

[N]ow that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for “performance related” reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly.

United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.

US attorney Iglesias was expected to file corruption cases against Democrats in New Mexico just befor the 2004 election even though there was no evidence to support corruption cases.

It wasn't that there was too little evidence to support the cases. There was simply NO evidence to support such a prosecution. I'm unaware of any law against pressuring a US attorney to file an unsupported case, though I'm sure there must be one. The most important thing about the Iglesias case, though, is that he was fired for failing to file partisan cases just prior to an election.

This is a situation in which both Sen. Pete Domenici (R - NM) and Rep. Heather Wilson were pressuring Iglesias to misuse his office for partisan advantage. At the very least, that is a violation of the ethics codes in both the House and Senate.

Then there was the Office of the Attorney General, where the Chief of Staff has now committed a "Libby." That is, he resigned to take the heat off of Attorney General Gonzales and others in the office.

Then there are the emails and documents which have been turned over (grudgingly and incompletely - as bad as the ones that were turned over have been, what are they hiding?) to the Congress show that the White House knew all about the firings, the reasons for the firings, and helped chose who was to be fired.

This is not some rogue operation by one or two individuals. This is Republican Party Policy!

This clearly shows that the national Republican Party is a criminal enterprise, in much the same way as the Mafia is. Just with less honor. The firing of the US attorneys is an illegal criminal conspiracy (assuming that there is a law against pushing a US atorney to bring indictments for purely politicla reasons) that includes Republicans at all levels and in all branches of government. Certainly the Republican Party is run in a totally unethical manner.

This isn't America. This is some tinpot bannann republic run by crazed right-wingers.

It's time for the Republicans to go.