Ooh, Alberto

One thing you gotta give to Abu Gonzales: he's a fighter.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has retreated from public view this week in an intensive effort to save his job, spending hours practicing testimony and phoning lawmakers for support in preparation for pivotal appearances in the Senate this month, according to administration officials.

After struggling for weeks to explain the extent of his involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales and his aides are viewing the Senate testimony on April 12 and April 17 as seriously as if it were a confirmation proceeding for a Supreme Court or a Cabinet appointment, officials said.

Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, and Timothy E. Flanigan, who worked for Gonzales at the White House, have met with the attorney general to plot strategy. The department has scheduled three days of rigorous mock testimony sessions next week and Gonzales has placed phone calls to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers seeking support, officials said.

I would suggest that this kind of intense lobbying and preparation is kind of a disqualification in and of itself. If you have to take off time from your job and spend weeks coming up with an explanation of why you should keep it, you probably shouldn't have it in the first place.

Of course, Abu G didn't want it this way. He wanted to testify immediately... I mean, as soon as Kyle Sampson did, anyway:

The White House said Monday that Gonzales' testimony cannot come too fast for the besieged attorney general to explain his explanations about the firings that Democrats contend were politically motivated.

"Look, the attorney general thinks it's in everyone's best interest — and we agree with him — that he be able to get up and talk to Congress sooner than later," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

"I think the American people would like to see us resolve this, so that we can move on and work on other things. So we'd like to see the hearing moved up to next week," Perino said.

Of course, the Attorney General stonewalled the committee for weeks until he had some discrepancies to clean up from the Sampson hearing. And if the White House and the Justice Department really wanted this to go away, they'd compel Monica Goodling to testify instead of pleading the Fifth, which apparently is happening because of Goodling's role at the DoJ:

As White House liaison, Goodling was part of a small cadre of senior Justice officials responsible for vetting U.S. Attorneys, a position that became far more significant after the 2006 reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, which gave Justice authority to install interim U.S. Attorneys without congressional approval. She played a central role in the appointment of her one-time boss J. Timothy Griffin, who replaced ousted U.S. Attorney H.E. "Bud" Cummins III in Arkansas. Beyond that, she wielded significant power in determining which U.S. Attorneys would go -- or stay [...]

Interviews for U.S. Attorney replacements took place with only a handful of people: David Margolis, the department's top-ranking career official and a 40-plus year veteran; a member of the White House Counsel's Office; the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys; and Goodling.

Charles Miller, whom Gonzales appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, interviewed with the panel in the fall of 2005. "They asked me what I'd done to support the president," Miller says. It wasn't a question Miller expected. He told them he'd voted for Bush.

But a former prosecutor who did not get a U.S. Attorney post was left with a sour feeling after his interview in 2006. "Monica was in charge, in essence, of the interview," recalls the former supervisory assistant U.S. Attorney. "I walked out of that room and thought, 'Wow, I've just run into a buzz saw.'"

If Goodling was using political tests for jobs at the Justice Department, she was violating federal law. The House Judiciary Committee has looked at her request to take the Fifth and deemed it without merit.

"We are concerned that several of the asserted grounds for refusing to testify do not satisfy the well-established bases for a proper invocation of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination," the two Democrats on the Judiciary Committee wrote. "The Fifth Amendment privilege, under long-standing Supreme Court precedents, does not provide a reason to fail to appear to testify; the privilege must be invoked by the witness on a question-by-question basis." [...]

"The fact that a few Senators and Members of the House have expressed publicly their doubts about the credibility of the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General in their representations to Congress about the U.S. Attorneys' termination does not in any way excuse your client from answering questions honestly and to the best of her ability," Conyers and Sánchez explained.

The more information that the respective Judiciary Committees can get from Goodling and the several other DoJ officials who testified behind closed doors late last week, the more informed they can be in hearings with Gonzales. Emptywheel thinks that Abu G was trying to move up his testimony before the Congress got any of this information. But there's little chance of that now (except for holding off Goodling), and so he's going to war with the evidence they have. And despite his lobbying efforts, Gonzales doesn't even have the support of his own party:

Several House Republicans are scoffing at Justice Department assertions that a principal reason for several of the dismissals was that the lawyers were not aggressively prosecuting immigration violations.

"It stretches anybody's credibility to suggest that this administration would have retaliated against U.S. attorneys for not enforcing immigration laws," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, told The Washington Times. "This administration itself is so lax in its attitude towards immigration laws and controlling the border."

Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, said he didn't think immigration cases had "a single thing to do with" the firings.

"I really just think it was political -- filling political jobs with political appointees," said Mr. Tancredo, who is running for president mostly on his stand against illegal aliens.

An aide to House Republican leadership agreed that the Justice Department's explanation for the firings is hard to believe.

"I don't think Republicans buy that," said the aide.

In the meantime, with everyone against him, Gonzales trains... and waits. As Paul Kiel said, you can almost hear "Eye of the Tiger" playing in the background.