The Gonzales/Bush Lie Machine

  Here is a look at Alberto Gonzales and the lies that he has told one more than one occasion in dealing with the prosecutor purge, from American Progress

Cover-Ups and Civil Liberties

March 26, 2007

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is not fit to be the nation's chief law enforcement officer. Since President Bush swore him in on Feb. 3, 2005, Gonzales has steadily politicized the Justice Department, putting partisan administration priorities above the best interests of the American people. His involvement in the Bush administration's prosecutor purge demonstrated his willingness to abuse his position and exploit the agency, whose mission is to "ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans." Now, both liberal and conservative lawmakers, pundits, members of the media, and the American public are pushing for Gonzales' resignation.

• Gonzales has misled and may have lied under oath to Congress. On March 12, Gonzales assured the nation that he did not participate in the administration's dismissal of eight well-respected U.S. attorneys: "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on." But emails released over the weekend show that the attorney general "was told of the dismissal plan on at least two occasions, in 2005 when the plan was devised and again in late 2006 shortly before the firings were carried out." This inconsistency is just the latest from the attorney general on the prosecutor purge. On Jan. 18, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that the Bush administration never intended to take advantage of a Patriot Act provision that allows the president to appoint "interim" U.S. attorneys for an indefinite period of time without Senate confirmation. But emails from Dec. 2006 show that Gonzales' then-chief of staff Kyle Sampson intended to use this provision to make an end-run around the Senate and evade the confirmation process.
• The Justice Department has attempted to cover up the partisan firings by accusing several of the ousted U.S. attorneys of failing to aggressively pursue charges of voter fraud. Republican leaders such as the New Mexico GOP chairman complained to Karl Rove that former prosecutor David Iglesias didn't go after voter fraud aggressively enough. The former U.S. attorney in Washington state, John McKay, upset White House officials and state GOP leaders when he refused to convene a federal grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the hotly contested 2004 gubernatorial election, which had been certified in favor of the Democratic candidate. McKay says his office thoroughly reviewed every allegation of voter fraud in the 2004 election, but "concurred with the state trial court judge that there was no evidence -- and let me just emphasize, zero evidence -- of election voter fraud in that election." Iglesias, who was called "inattentive" to voter fraud by New Mexico GOP officials, had actually been "heralded for his expertise in that area [voter fraud] by the Justice Department, which twice selected him to train other federal prosecutors to pursue election crimes." As The New York Times notes, "In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on 'fraud,' the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system."
• Under Gonzales' leadership, politics have chipped away at civil liberties. Politics has trumped civil liberties during Gonzales' tenure at the Justice Department. Gonzales advised the president to shut down "a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program" when he "learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation." Last week, Sharon Y. Eubanks, the "leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies," said that "Bush loyalists" in Gonzales' office "repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case." "The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public." More recently, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine concluded that FBI agents often demanded Americans' personal data "without official authorization, and in other cases improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances." The administration's abuses of requirements imposed by Congress were "precisely the provisions which President Bush expressly proclaimed he could ignore when he issued a 'signing statement' as part of the enactment of the Patriot Act's renewal into law."

 

Tags: Alberto Gonzales George Bush U.S. attorney's,Congress