Gonzales’s Suspicious Omission

The Opinionator

“Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides – who have since resigned because of their central roles in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys – extraordinary authority over the hiring and firing of most non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department,” Murray Waas reports in National Journal. “A copy of the order and other Justice Department records related to the conception and implementation of the order were provided to National Journal.”

Waas’s analysis: “The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level.” He adds:

An original draft of Gonzales’s delegation of authority to Sampson and Goodling was so broad that it did not even require the two aides to obtain the final approval of the attorney general before moving to dismiss other department officials, according to records obtained by National Journal.

The department’s Office of Legal Counsel feared that such an unconditional delegation of authority was unconstitutional, the documents show. As a result, the original delegation was rewritten so that in its final form the order required “any proposed appointments or removals of personnel” be “presented to the Attorney General… for approval, and each appointment or removal shall be made in the name of the Attorney General.

Alberto Gonzales failed to mention this order during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, notes Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, at the academic group blog The Reality Based Community. Kleiman writes, “His failure to mention this in his Senate testimony may or may not constitute a crime; it depends on precisely what questions he was asked. But it certainly represents an intolerable deception.”