Effort to Designate Gonzales as Fall Guy in Purge Scandal Ramps Up
At the beginning of the week when Karl Rove was first implicated in the prosecutor purge scandal, making him the second of George W. Bush's closest and longest serving advisors to be caught up in the story after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, I posited that the President would soon be faced with the decision to sacrifice one of his friends to save the other. By Monday night and early Tuesday morning, it was already becoming clear that the Justice Department (DoJ) was being set up to take the fall for this scandal, with Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson being forced to resign and Gonzales himself holding a press conference to try to salvage his job -- but also to divert the media's attention in his direction. In Wednesday morning's papers, Republicans close to the Bush administration were already leaking information about the newly growing divide between the President and his Attorney General. By this afternoon, the first Republican Senator had openly called for Gonzales to be fired.
Now, courtesy of a number of different newspaper reports that will hit stands Thursday morning, we can see that the White House is ramping up its effort to distance itself from Gonzales and shift blame in his direction. The lede from Sheryl Gay Stolberg's article in The New York Times:
President Bush said Wednesday that he had confidence in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, but that he was "frankly not happy about" the way Mr. Gonzales had handled the dismissal of federal prosecutors, a move that has led to a Congressional investigation into whether the White House allowed politics to interfere with law enforcement. [emphasis added]
McClatchy's Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor take a look at the effort from another angle -- how some at the DoJ are lining up to bite the bullet.
The Justice Department said Wednesday that revisions in the USA Patriot Act that gave the administration unprecedented powers to replace ousted U.S. attorneys were designed by a mid-level department lawyer without the knowledge of his superiors or anyone at the White House.[...]
Wednesday's explanation of the Patriot Act changes, along with the release of new e-mail correspondence, was meant to stave off mounting accusations by Democrats as their investigation into the administration's firing of the prosecutors widens. Democrats say they now are suspicious that the changes were part of an attempt to grab executive powers and play politics with prosecutorial appointments. They also accused the Justice Department of misleading Congress about the intent of the new law. [emphasis added]
Talev and Taylor are noticeably skeptical about this explanation, writing the DoJ official in question, principal associate deputy attorney general William Moschella, "and department officials also could not explain why the then-assistant attorney general for legislative affairs was in a position to pursue such a change without input from others within the department or permission from superiors." These two McClatchy reporters certainly have good reason to question the assertion by those both in the White House and the DoJ that culpability lies more squarely on the latter than the former. Eric Lipton and David Johnston of The Times write in Thursday's paper about the close -- and many would argue too close -- relationship between President and Attorney General in this administration. (I won't quote from the article here due to space constraints, but definitely check it out for even more background on the scandal.)
So quite clearly what we have here is an attempt on the part of the White House to make the DoJ -- and the Attorney General, if necessary -- the fall guys for the prosecutor purge scandal. By definition, a fall guy is one who has committed some wrongdoing but accepts responsibility for actions beyond his own. And indeed, Gonzales and his staff have misused the power of their office. But they are far from the only ones to have done so, with evidence that even the President was involved having come out in days past. So although there is a real possibility to hold a cabinet-level official responsible for a serious offense against the American people (a chance that does not come around often), we cannot and must not lose sight of the fact that this scandal reaches far beyond just the DoJ -- all of the way, in fact, into the Oval Office.
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