Via ABC News: Documents Show Gonzales Approved Firings
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, according to documents released Friday that contradict earlier claims that he was not closely involved in the dismissals.The Nov. 27 meeting, in which the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials participated, focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Justice Department officials said late Friday.
There, Gonzales signed off on the plan, which was crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week amid a political firestorm surrounding the firings.
The documents indicated that the hour-long morning discussion, held in the attorney general’s conference room, was the only time Gonzales met with top aides who decided which prosecutors to fire and how to do it.
[...]
On March 13, in explaining the firings, Gonzales told reporters he was aware that some of the dismissals were being discussed but was not involved in them.
“I knew my chief of staff was involved in the process of determining who were the weak performers where were the districts around the country where we could do better for the people in that district, and that’s what I knew,” Gonzales said last week. “But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That’s basically what I knew as the attorney general.”
Well, perhaps he really wasn’t paying attention in the meeting (or, perhaps it depends on what “knew” and “not involved in any discussions” means).
And the story just continues to create more headaches for the administration. Certainly it will be interesting to see what Sampson says when he testifies about meetings, the AG and such.
If all of this business was just about the President executing his legal right to fire political appointees, why is it that members of the administration can’t get their stories straight? At best the answer is gross incompetence.
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March 23rd, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Assuming Gonzales stays on until the end of the administration, one has to assume that he will have lost quite a bit of credibility. I don’t see the advantage of keeping him on, as he seems more of a liability than an asset. I suspect the reason he has not been fired thus far has more to do with his personal friendship with the president than with his ability to perform his job going forward.
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:14 pm
There is the possibility that this was not considered a big deal at the time, which would certainly explain lousy memories. Of course, so would the innate tendency of people to try to remember things in a self-serving way. Every time they recall a crucial detail, I have seen honest defendants convince themselves of their own virtue ever more progressively, so that by sheer force of repetitin, tehy have convinced themselves that somethign occurred in a far better way (from their perspective) than even they argued at first. It could be a conspiracy, it could be mendacity, or it could be memory plus wishing makes it so - which tends to be, in my experience, how memory, especiall frequently recalled memory or memory acquired under stress, actually works. none of that is admissible in court however.
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Hey hey hey! Lets not jump to conclusions here. The document in question–dated Nov. 27–occured during the 18 day “gap” where docs released by DoJ didn’t appear earlier in the week.
Remember the Administration’s explanation for the gap was because people were on Thanksgiving break for those 18 days.
Lets cut Alberto some slack–he was probably concentrating on Turkey Day, rather than the Attorney General stuff anyway.