The Daily Background

NYT today on Gonzales’ third “clarification” of his involvement in the US Attorney firing scandal:

“There obviously remains some confusion about my involvement in this. My reputation and integrity is very important, so let me try again to clarify my involvement.”

Mr. Gonzales said he had asked Mr. Sampson to “coordinate an effort within the department to evaluate the performance of the U.S. attorneys to see where changes might be appropriate. From time to time, Kyle would tell me things that would tell me that this effort was ongoing. I don’t recall being involved in deliberations involving the question of whether or not a U.S. attorney should or should not be asked to resign.”

Mr. Gonzales said he was not involved in choosing individual attorneys to oust from their jobs.

“I didn’t focus on specific concerns about individuals,” he said. “My primary focus was insuring that the White House was kept advised of what we were doing and that Kyle was consulting with the appropriate D.O.J. senior officials who knew about the performance of the U.S. attorneys.”

What the hell? Pay attention to that last bit: he claims that he didn’t pay attention to specific concerns about specific prosecutors. Does that mean he didn’t pay attention to the specific reasons they were fired? Does that mean he didn’t pay attention to specific concerns that they were being fired wrongly? Does that mean that he didn’t pay attention to specific concerns that people had about certain US Attorneys?

It’s hard to make sense out of this. Sampson admitted yesterday that at least one US Attorney, David Iglesias, was fired wrongly and that if he could go back and do things over again, he would have made sure that Iglesias wasn’t let go. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) was of course the major player giving “specific concerns” about Iglesias, because Domenici wanted Iglesias to get sacked after he failed to indict Democrats on corruption charges before the November elections last year.

Does Gonzales regret firing Iglesias? Does he, like Sampson, admit that it was a mistake? Is he now claiming that he didn’t pay attention to the complaints that Karl Rove got from Domenici and others about Iglesias? This latest clarification, like Sampson’s testimony yesterday, raises more questions than answers.

Ultimately when you have a situation where at least one official (in this case Gonzales’ right hand man) is admitting that they fired somebody wrongly, and there are questions about his firing being a matter of revenge after he failed to do Republicans’ political bidding, isn’t Gonzales accountable for this? I mean, Gonzales himself signed off on the plan to fire the US Attorneys, he admitted it once again today.

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