Gonzales Watch

Abu G remains a marked man. I don't buy the White House's smug and whiny statements that they have even more confidence in him. Like all babies, they refuse to deny reality. Gonzales' failure to explain himself properly before the Senate, and his failure to even know what the hell's going on in the Justice Department, is a firing offense.

But there's more at work here. As long as Gonzales is still on the payroll, the focus remains on him. I think that Gonzales is the firewall so that the Congress doesn't get to the real culprit behind this story. And that road leads inside the White House.

After thousands of pages of documents and hours of testimony from Justice Department officials, it remains unknown who in the Bush administration conceived the plan to fire eight U.S. attorneys and why.

Gonzales' testimony Thursday left senators convinced he wasn't behind the plan or its execution and in fact knew far less than a department head should have about the details. Former and current members of Gonzales' staff who've been interviewed by congressional investigators also have said their roles were limited or nonexistent.

Absent another explanation, the signs point to the White House and, at least in some degree, to the president's political adviser, Karl Rove.

David Iglesias, the former New Mexico U.S. attorney and one of the eight fired last year, said investigating the White House's role is the logical next step - one that would follow existing clues about Rove's involvement.

"If I were Congress, I would say, `If the attorney general doesn't have answers, then who would?' There's enough evidence to indicate that Karl Rove was involved up to his eyeballs." [...]

"The arrow points more and more to the White House," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "The one thing I can assure you of: This is not over, far from it."

Iglesias continued that the lack of a paper trail suggests that the real papers on this are in the White House.

I mean, it's hard to even conceive this. Eight US Attorneys were fired and nobody seems to know how their names got on the list. Not the Attorney General. Not his chief of staff. Not any of the top officials at the Justice Department. They've all stated this in testimony. It's amazing that the Justice Department can make personnel decisions without anyone there knowing how they got there.

The truth is that we're finding politicization at all levels of the Justice Department, all the way down to the intern program:

After choosing potential candidates to interview, the division personnel forwarded their lists to the Office of Attorney Recruitment Management for what was traditionally final approval. This is no longer a final step, however, because the list had to go higher - to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. When the list of potential interviewees was returned this year, it had been cut dramatically.

When division personnel staff later compared the remaining interviewees with the candidates struck form the list, one common denominator appeared repeatedly: most of those struck form the list had interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a "liberal" cause, or otherwise appeared to have "liberal" leanings. Summa cum laude graduates of both Yale and Harvard were rejected for interviews.

This is unprecedented, and the same concerns many of us see in firing federal prosecutors with clear ties to investigating Republicans or not pushing bogus voter fraud investigations. It's embarrassingly clear that the Bush White House has pushed these fraud cases for the singular purpose of restricting minority voter turnout, and were installing loyal apparatchiks into several swing states where they could continue this process unrestricted by any conflicting opinion. And in the absence of any DoJ admission that the firing was their idea, one can only conclude that this Prosecutor Purge was part of the plan.

Therefore, keeping Abu G in place, no matter what he's done, is crucial to this effort. Clearly he's lied to individual members of Congress, he's lied to the American people, he's lied in front of the Senate. But he's not the issue, ultimately. And so attention on him is misplaced. Some Senators are even admitting this:

That's why some Republicans think Gonzales should stay on the job.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Gonzales in a telephone call Friday that the worst was probably over for him and that stepping down wouldn't necessarily help the president.

In a statement he released later in the day, Cornyn said, "Democrats see an opportunity to score a lot of political points, so I don't necessarily believe that the attorney general's resignation would quell the Democrats' desire to continue with a partisan fishing expedition."

As long as the media can report about "such-and-such Republican says Gonzales should resign," the White House can ultimately weather the storm. If it digs deeper, that's a road they don't want things to go down.

UPDATE: This Dahlia Lithwick article gets to the nut of things in a different way:

On sober second thought, it occurs to me that when I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with "White House insiders" and the National Review that Alberto Gonzales disgraced himself yesterday, I may have missed something important. Assuming the president watched so much as 10 minutes of his attorney general being poleaxed by even rudimentary questions from the Senate judiciary committee, it strains credulity to believe that Gonzales still has Bush's "full confidence."

Until you stop to consider that the president wasn't watching the same movie as the rest of us and that Gonzales wasn't reading from the same script. Perhaps what we witnessed yesterday was in fact a tour de force, a home run for the president's overarching theory of the unitary executive.

The theory of the unitary executive is a radical vision of executive power in which the president is the big boss of the entire executive branch and has final say over everything that happens within it. At its core, the theory holds that Congress has very limited authority to divest the president of those powers. An expanded version of this theory was the legal predicate for the torture memo: "In light of the president's complete authority over the conduct of war, without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority in these areas. … Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

If you watch the Gonzales hearing through this prism (and in this White House, even the bathroom windows look out through that prism), they were a triumph. For six impressive hours, the attorney general embodied the core principles that he is not beholden to Congress, that the Senate has no authority over him, and that he was only there as a favor to them in their funny little fact-finding mission.

And that stonewalling keeps anyone from poking over the fence and inside the office of Karl Rove.