The Daily Background

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been lying to Congress since even before he was an Attorney General. Flashback time:

When Alberto R. Gonzales was asked during his January 2005 confirmation hearing whether the Bush administration would ever allow wiretapping of U.S. citizens without warrants, he initially dismissed the query as a “hypothetical situation.”

But when Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) pressed him further, Gonzales declared: “It is not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes.”

By then, however, the government had been conducting a secret wiretapping program for more than three years without court oversight, possibly in conflict with federal intelligence laws. Gonzales had personally defended the effort in fierce internal debates.

Gonzales knew that the question Feingold asked was not “hypothetical” and that it in fact was extremely topical and relevant, and that what Feingold feared was going on at that very moment, since Gonzales was involved directly in the legal justification for the program as White House Counsel before he was nominated for Attorney General. An independent special counsel is desperately needed to investigate Gonzales’ extensive record of not being forthcoming with Congress, and, failing that, impeachment proceeding for the A.G. are in order.

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