Dan Eggan and Paul Kane of the Washington Post have filed a chilling report detailing a confrontation between Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft over the administration's domestic surveillance program, a program the justice department had determined was illegal. During yesterday's testimony before the senate judiciary committee James B. Comey told the panel that on the night of March 10, 2004, Ashcroft lay seriously ill in intensive care. Comey, who was then acting Attorney General, learned that Gonzales and Andy Card were on their way to the hospital to have Ashcroft overrule Comey's decision not to reauthorize the program.
(Comey) alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's presence in the room, turned and left.Read the entire story. It is like something out of a political potboiler. Apparently the President signed off on the program without ever receiving approval from the Department of Justice. According to David Johnston of The New York Times after approving the illegal program, the President directed the justice department to take necessary, but undisclosed, steps to bring it into compliance with the law.
The sickbed visit was the start of a dramatic showdown between the White House and the Justice Department in early 2004 that, according to Comey, was resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card. But that was not before Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller and their aides prepared a mass resignation, Comey said.
"The story is a shocking one. It makes you almost gulp," Schumer said. "The incident shows that Gonzales holds the rule of law `in minimum low regard,'" the senator said, adding, "It's hard to understand after hearing this story how Attorney General Gonzales could remain as attorney general."
Laurie Asseo of Bloomberg reports
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the committee's ranking Republican, said the confrontation ``has some characteristics of the Saturday Night Massacre'' during the Nixon administration when top Justice Department officials resigned rather than fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox.Ashcroft declined to comment on Comey's testimony.
Specter also said yesterday's announcement that Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty will resign provided ``evidence that the department really cannot function with the continued leadership or lack of leadership of Attorney General Gonzales.'' . . .
Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said Gonzales is doing an ``abysmal job'' and the Justice Department is ``being run like a political arm of the White House.''
Feel safer because people in the Department of Justice stood tall for our rights? Well, the good guys in this story have all left government. The bad guys are still there. Now do you feel safer?
