If Murray Waas’ story in the National Journal is picked up and expanded upon by a larger number of news organizations then the growing scandal over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will raise a whole new questions about President George Bush’s role:
Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration’s warrant less domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.
Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.
It is unclear whether the president knew at the time of his decision that the Justice inquiry — to be conducted by the department’s internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility — would almost certainly examine the conduct of his attorney general.
Sources familiar with the halted inquiry said that if the probe had been allowed to continue, it would have examined Gonzales’s role in authorizing the eavesdropping program while he was White House counsel, as well as his subsequent oversight of the program as attorney general.Both the White House and Gonzales declined comment on two issues — whether Gonzales informed Bush that his own conduct was about to be scrutinized, and whether he urged the president to close down the investigation, which had been requested by Democratic members of Congress.
Read his piece in full for the details.
The key is whether this story picked up by other media, picked up by Congress, and whether there are demands for answers to questions raised by it — and whether the answers address the questions adequately or are evasive. It’ll certainly provide fodder for Congressional hearings on the issue. Waas also has some opinions from experts:
Stephen Gillers, a law professor at the New York University School of Law and an expert on legal ethics issues, questioned Gonzales’s continued role in advising Bush in any capacity about the probe after he learned that his own conduct might be scrutinized: “If the attorney general was on notice that he was a person of interest to the OPR inquiry, he should have stepped aside and not been involved in any decisions about the scope or the continuation of the investigation.”
Robert Litt, a principal associate deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, agreed. Gonzales “should have recused himself. He should not have played a role in an investigation that touches upon him.”An even more serious issue, according to Gillers, Litt, and others is whether Gonzales informed Bush that the investigation was going to examine his actions. “Did the president know that Gonzales might have been shutting down the police force when it was looking into his own behavior?” Gillers asked.
Charles Wolfram, a professor emeritus of legal ethics at Cornell University Law School, said that if Gonzales did not inform the president, Gonzales ill-served Bush and abused “the discretion of his office” for his own benefit. However, if Gonzales did inform Bush that the probe might harm Gonzales, then “both [men] are abusing the discretion of their offices,” Wolfram said.When it was disclosed in July that Bush himself had halted the OPR investigation, White House press secretary Tony Snow said that the president’s decision was justified because the eavesdropping program was already subject to other executive branch oversight. “The Office of Professional Responsibility was not the proper venue for conducting that.” Snow also said that the president’s denial of the security clearances was warranted because “in the case of a highly classified program, you need to keep the number of people to it tight for reasons of national security, and that was what he did.”
The problem is: there is now a pattern on many issues involving the Bush administration: it plays by its own rules, the rules it sets while it seemingly demands others play by another set of rules (that it also sets). And there is always a legalistic explanation for something happening that either was done poorly or done in a way that is at variance with how other administrations did it or with traditional Republican conservative values. But the one thing the explanations can’t obscure is the pattern.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.