Senate Panel Subpoenas Gonzales Over Rove Emails

What did Alberto Gonzales know about Karl Rove, and when did he know it?Senate Panel Subpoenas Gonzales Over Karl Rove EmailsBy Cliff Montgomery – May 3rd, 2007A Senate panel subpoenaed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Wednesday, ordering him to provide all emails related to White House spin doctor Karl Rove and the firings of eight federal prosecutors.Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) issued the subpoena.”It is troubling that significant documents highly relevant to the committee’s inquiry have not been produced,” Leahy wrote in a letter to Gonzales. The subpoena gives Gonzales until May 15th to hand over the emails.Leahy also noted he has repeatedly asked Gonzales for the documents, but has yet to receive a response.Gonzales fired the prosecutors last year as part of a plan which originated at the White House.The Bush Administration claims that the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys last year was justified, even though several of those fired had received positive job reviews just before their dismissals.Before the firings, the Bush Administration ranked federal prosecutors according to their apparent political affiliation. One of the fired U.S. attorneys, Bud Cummings of Arkansas, was fired to make room for Tim Griffin, a former top aide to Rove.Congressional investigators are therefore attempting to determine if the dismissals were politically motivated.President George W. Bush, as reliably failing as a broken clock, rejected all bipartisan, reasonable calls to fire Gonzales. The attorney general has become the butt of jokes both in and outside the Beltway for his appearance last month before Leahy’s committee, in which he apparently failed to remember any aspect of his job performance which might somehow pertain to the fired prosecutors.As the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank quipped a few days after Gonzales’ testimony, “Maybe Gonzales won’t recall his painful day on the Hill” either.It was painful indeed. Just examine these words from Senator and Judiciary Committee member Tom Coburn (R-OK):”[The prosecutor issue] was handled incompetently. The communication was atrocious,” Coburn told Gonzales. “You ought to suffer the consequences that these others have suffered, and I believe that the best way to put this behind us is your resignation.”And this is from one of the Republicans on the committee. As you might expect, lawmakers  have promised to continue with their investigations.The Justice Department announced on Wednesday it was looking into whether its former White House point-person, Monica Goodling, considered political affiliation in deciding whom to hire as career prosecutors in U.S. attorney offices nationwide, which is of course a direct violation of the law.What is interesting is that this Justice Department move is occurring just as Goodling–formerly a top aide to Gonzales–receives a limited immunity from a House committee to testify about the moves of department head Alberto Gonzales and other Justice Department honchos during the firings.Meanwhile, the House of Representatives Judiciary subcommittee, which on Thursday will hear from former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, released written responses it received from six of the dismissed U.S. attorneys who testified before it in March.Paul Charlton, fired prosecutor in Arizona, wrote the panel that just before a Senate appearance by Gonzales this year, he received a call from Mike Elston, a top Justice Department official.”In that conservation I believe that Elston was offering me a quid pro quo agreement: my silence in exchange for the attorney general’s,” wrote Charlton.San Diego’s Carol Lam, fired after scoring a bribery conviction against then-Republican Rep. Duke Cunningham of California, wrote the House subcommittee she was denied a request for more time on the job.Lam, among seven prosecutors told on December 7th that they were being replaced, wrote the House panel that Elston called her in January and said to “me that my request for more time based on case-related considerations was ‘not being received positively.”‘”He insisted that I had to depart in a matter of weeks, not months, and that the instructions were ‘coming from the very highest levels of government,”‘ Lam wrote the House subcommittee.In the usual neo-conservative vein of wishful thinking, Justice Department heads have offered shifting and even conflicting explanations of why the U.S. attorneys were fired.It first claimed they were fired because of performance-related problems–they were just bad prosecutors. That explanation failed when the fired prosecutors’ positive reviews showed up. Then they claimed many dismissals involved policy differences between the fired U.S. attorneys and the administration. But recently released internal documents have revealed that lack of personal loyalty to Bush was also a major factor in the firings.David Iglesias, ousted in New Mexico after ignoring what he’s described as ‘political pressure’ in an investigation, wrote the House subcommittee that he asked Mike Battle, then head of the U.S. Attorneys Office, if he could explain why he was being fired.”I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” Iglesias quoted Battle as saying.