sen. leahy and sen. specter april 25, 2007 follow-up letter to alberto gonzales

April 25, 2007

The Honorable Alberto Gonzales
Attorney General
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Attorney General Gonzales:

As part of the Committee’s investigation into the replacement of U.S. Attorneys, we are writing to ask you to promptly supplement your testimony of April 19 with answers to those questions for which you responded that you could not recall or did not know. We ask that you submit this supplemental information within a week.

You spent weeks preparing for the April 19th hearing. Yet during your testimony, in response to questions from Senators on both sides of the aisle, you often responded that you could not recall. By some counts you failed to answer more than 100 questions, by other counts more than 70, but the most conservative count had you failing to provide answers well over 60 times. As a result, the Committee’s efforts to learn the truth of why and how these dismissals took place, and the role you and other Department and White House officials had in them, has been hampered.

The questions asked by Senators should not have been a surprise. You were alerted in letters to you well in advance of last Thursday’s hearing. By letter sent April 4, you were asked to include in your written testimony a “full and complete account of the development of the plan to replace Untied States Attorneys, and all the specifics of your role in connection with that matter.” That account was not included in your written testimony nor in your answers to questions at the hearing. You were also alerted in advance of the hearing, by a letter sent on April 13, that you would be asked about information derived from the staff interviews of your senior aides. You were, nevertheless, unprepared to answer those questions.

We believe the Committee and our investigation would benefit from you searching and refreshing your recollection and your supplementing your testimony by next Friday to provide the answers to the questions you could not recall last Thursday.

Sincerely,

/s/ PATRICK LEAHY
Chairman

/s/ ARLEN SPECTER
Ranking Member

now. . . that’s gonna leave a mark!

sen. sheldon whitehouse on white house staffers’. . .

. . .”inappropriate” access to criminal cases,
and investigations, under alberto gonzales. . .

christy hardin smith at firedoglake
has made this point far more eloquently
than i might, here, but i’ve tried to
capture — in 3 minutes of video and
graphics — both the set-up, and the
“take-down” of alberto gonzales
at the senate judiciary committee hearing
on april 19, 2007. . .

gonzales admits that about 447 people have
access to non-national-security criminal
cases and investigations data, via the gonzales/
bush DoJ, while only 3 had such access via
president clinton and reno. those three were very
very high-ranking officials. here, it seems,
fairly low-level, political appointees have
such access — over four hundred of them.

[ed. note: improved youtube video
here, now -- more graphics, music and
20 seconds of additional "set-up" . . .]

so — where is alberto gonzales’ press release
dated friday (or this morning!), saying he will
immediately, and permanently, close this
swiss-cheese access system the white house
staff-rats presently enjoy, given his clear
agreement with senator whitehouse that this
sort of access is “highly improper“?

where? here? no, but this is
a much better way to handle access:

where? here? nope — the bush/gonzales way: