It's Make-or-Break Time for Gonzales
Tuesday is a make-or-break day for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Will he survive the white-hot scrutiny that he's certain to receive this week in the wake of hundreds of pages of documents, including E-mails, about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year? Democrats in Congress, armed with subpoena powers, are taking the matter to the highest levels, including the door of President Bush's political guru himself, Karl Rove.
That's not all.
At least one Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, has charged that the issuance of search warrants by the U.S. attorney in San Diego for a top CIA official's home and office in a massive public corruption case last year was at the root of that prosecutor's summary dismissal. That significantly ups the ante for the overall Democratic probe of the firings and raises questions as to who did what to prevent that prosecutor from carrying out her ever expanding probe into highly connected, powerful Republicans.
But those aren't the only woes that the embattled attorney general, long viewed with extraordinary distrust by civil liberties groups, confronts this week. The Justice Department's problem child, the FBI, has done it again. This time, it's the bureau's failure to comply with the legal requirements in issuing so-called National Security Letters (NSLs)–highly powerful and intrusive tools to get personal and financial information on virtually anyone, including U.S. citizens – that has landed the bureau in hot water. Today, the Justice Department's inspector general will describe to congress how the FBI repeatedly and deliberately "circumvented" the law in its use of NSLs, a tool that FBI Director Robert Mueller obtained with the solemn promise that civil liberties would be protected.
There are multiple oversight hearings scheduled this week regarding these crises: a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday on the FBI's use of NSLs; a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the same topic Wednesday; a hearing on FBI oversight for Thursday by the House Select Intelligence Committee.
The disturbing threat that runs through these crises is the assertion by Gonzales and Mueller that they did not know the problems–in Gonzales's case, long communications between his chief of staff and the White House over which U.S. attorneys to fire and for what reasons, and in Mueller's case, that his own counterterrorism officials, sitting in the same building where he sits, had issued more than 100,000 NSLs to improperly obtain information on people without adequately documenting that they were targets of investigations and did so despite growing concerns inside the bureau as to the manner in which this information was being obtained.
"Mueller and the FBI did not track closely NSLs, even though members of Congress clearly were concerned about the potential for invading Americans' privacy," says Carl Tobias, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Richmond. "Gonzales did not even know what his chief of staff was doing."
And says Tobias, Gonzales's story has changed several times, adding to the furor on Capitol Hill.
Both Mueller and Gonzales have accepted accountability for the scandals, although neither has offered to resign. But Mueller, a former marine, has long been the Teflon director and escaped any real oversight on Capitol Hill, while Gonzales has repeatedly been raked over the coals. FBI watchers attribute that to Mueller's likability factor.
Many Democrats dislike Gonzales because he is viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a mouthpiece for the president, because he was long his trusted lawyer. It's clear that both the FBI and the Justice Department will be raked over the coals this week.
The outcome:
"Gonzales may resign very soon, perhaps as early as this week," says Tobias. "Mueller may be able to ride it out because so much attention is focused on the U.S. attorneys. But the inspector general testimony may reignite the NSL flap and focus on Mueller."
More likely, though, it's Gonzales who will be sacrificed at the alter of partisan politics and Mueller, Justice watchers say, will disappear in the ensuing dust, once again unscathed.
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