Newt Gingrich appearing on Fox News Sunday today stated that it appears that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may have perjured himself. Hm, Ya think?
Gingrich: Both the president and country are better served if the attorney general is a figure of competence. Sadly, the current attorney general is not seen as any of those things. I think it’s a liability for the president. More importantly, it’s a liability for the United States of America.
But Gingrich isn't the only, every prominent Conservative that Fox asked to give "Gonzo's Side" of the story refused to do it.
Chris Wallace: “By the way, we invited White House officials and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend Attorney General Gonzales,” said Wallace. “We had no takers.”
Frankly people, that is stunning. I didn't think I'd see the day when the cabal of Neo-ConArtist inside the Beltway would actually put down Bush's water, but it seems they just might have finally done it.
More from Thinkprogress.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), appearing on ABC’s This Week, said “of course” Gonzales has a credibility problem. On MSNBC’s Hardball on Friday, Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT), the ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, squirmed when asked by host Chris Matthews if he thought Gonzales “is a good attorney general?” Cannon refused to answer the question, offering instead, “He’s a good guy.”
National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg, a reliable partisan defender of the Bush administration, admitted on Thursday that the evidence against Gonzales is compelling. “I think Gonzales has long, long, long outserved whatever usefulness he might once have had,” wrote Goldberg. “And — hey — maybe he actually did perjure himself.”
But it's not a total shutout, riding high where all Republicans Now Fear to Tread you can count on the New York Times to come to Gonzo's rescue.
A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.
The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.
Y'see, strategic leaks from the Bush Admin indicate that the dispute between Gonzo and the Senate was simply about the "Data Mining" program which is an extention or portion of the "Terrorist Surveillance Program". Rather than tracking international phone calls without a warrant as the NSA does, this is a process used to track international/domestic e-mail traffic using various telecom providers such as AT&T Bellsouth and Verizon, not to mention millions of terabytes of personal information about American Citizens which the FBI has simply gone out and bought.
Right, it's a completely different program of warrantless eavesdropping on American Citizens that Comey, Ashcroft and over 30 DOJ officialswere going to resign over. This one doesn't violate FISA, it just violates the Telecom Act of 1996 which states that private information about suscribers can not be shared with the government without a warrant.
Problem solved, right?
Urm, not quite as Glenn Greenwald points out.
This leak would be arguably exculpatory for Gonzales only if it reported that data mining was the only source of the Comey/Ashcroft objections, not merely one of the sources. But both articles explicitly states that there were other grounds for those objections besides data mining, leaving open -- rather than resolving -- the only relevant questions: did those objections, contrary to Gonzales' sworn testimony, relate to the "TSP's" warrantless eavesdropping?
Born and Bred in South Central LA. I spent 12 years working in the IT Dept. for federal contractor Northrop-Grumman on classified and high security projects such as the B2 Bomber. After Northrop I became an IT consultant with the state of California in Sacramento and worked on projects with the Dept of Consumer Affairs and CalTrans, as well as projects for Kaiser Permanente in Oakland. Now living in Los Angeles with my own independant web design company where I operate the Truth 2 Power Online Radio Station.
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