The Daily Background

Well, this is certainly interesting. In their editorial Sunday, calling for Gonzales to be investigated by a special counsel or impeached, The New York Times slips in this line: “Unwilling to accept that conclusion, Vice President Dick Cheney sent Mr. Gonzales and another official to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to get him to approve the wiretapping.”

As TPM notes:

I was not aware that it had ever been established that Vice President Cheney ordered the visit. Speculated, rumored, sure. But I wasn’t aware this had been established at all.

And yet the Times states it rather offhandedly as a fact. So what do they know?

Editorials like these are sometimes a venue where facts are stuck in which are ‘known’ to be true but which cannot be sourced cleanly or clearly enough to make it onto the news pages. Is that what’s up here?

Gonzales has consistently said that he went to the hospital to visit Ashcroft “on the president’s behalf,” but has refused to say whether the president actually ordered him to go, or who exactly did order him to go. You can catch Gonzales feeding this line to a very annoyed Schumer near the beginning of this video:

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog