More Shades of Watergate
The day after the number two guy at the Department of Justice announces his resignation ... the former number two guy tells a tale worthy of a Hollywood potboiler. Three years ago in March, he says, then White House Counsel Gonzales and then White House chief of staff Andrew Card tried to coerce Attorney General John Ashcroft into reauthorizing the Bush warrantless wiretapping scheme.
“I was very upset,” [James Comey, then the deputy attorney general] told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. “I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me.”...
He said Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other top Justice Department officials also considered resigning until President Bush intervened and allowed modifications to the program that they could accept...
Upon learning the next day that the wiretap program was reauthorized by the White House “without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality,” Comey was ready to resign.
“I didn't believe that as the chief law enforcement officer in the country I could stay when they had gone ahead and done something that the Justice Department had said had no legal basis,” Comey said.
On 20 October 1973, Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus resigned over President Nixon's firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
In Seattle last week, former United States Attorney John McKay said that Gonzales "did not fully appreciate the difference between being AG and White House counsel." It sounds from Tuesday's tale that he treated the considered opinions of Justice lawyers with disdain long before he took the reins and began driving Justice down the road of politicization.
Powerline has a different spin: that Gonzales and Card were attempting to determine if Comey were staging a coup.
Nevertheless, 56 members of Gonzales' graduating class at Harvard Law School took out an ad in Tuesday's Washington Post, "excoriating their former classmate for his 'cavalier handling of our freedoms.'” The class of 1982 had its 25th reunion two weeks ago; Gonzales attended.
See Slate, USA Today Letter To The Editor, Washington Post editorial.
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