WP, pg1: Gonzales's Truthfulness Long Disputed: Misstatements to Shield Bush Stretch Back a Decade

[DeepModem Mom]

Gonzales's Truthfulness Long Disputed
Claims of Misstatements to Shield Bush Stretch Back a Decade
By Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, July 30, 2007; Page A01

When Alberto R. Gonzales was asked during his January 2005 confirmation hearing whether the Bush administration would ever allow wiretapping of U.S. citizens without warrants, he initially dismissed the query as a "hypothetical situation."

But when Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) pressed him further, Gonzales declared: "It is not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes."

By then, however, the government had been conducting a secret wiretapping program for more than three years without court oversight, possibly in conflict with federal intelligence laws. Gonzales had personally defended the effort in fierce internal debates. Feingold later called his testimony that day "misleading and deeply troubling."

The accusation that Gonzales has been deceptive in his public remarks has erupted this summer into a full-blown political crisis for the Bush administration, as the beleaguered attorney general struggles repeatedly to explain to Congress the removal of a batch of U.S. attorneys, the wiretapping program and other actions.

In each case, Gonzales has appeared to lawmakers to be shielding uncomfortable facts about the Bush administration's conduct on sensitive matters. A series of misstatements and omissions has come to define his tenure at the helm of the Justice Department and is the central reason that lawmakers in both parties have been trying for months to push him out of his job.

Yet controversy over Gonzales's candor about George W. Bush's conduct or policies has actually dogged him for more than a decade, since he worked for Bush in Texas....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/29/AR2007072901327.html?hpid=topnews

[Dinger]

1. K & R

[gulliver]

2. Gonzales is Bush's Hispanic Law Degree

His job is to create the legal sophistry to provide a foundation for whatever Cheney has Bush do.

[Robbien]

3. His lies go back a decade, but the WaPo has just now decided to report on it

And a wimpy report it is. Listen WaPo, the word is lies. What's this bushspeak misstatements term you meekly throw in there.

[BlooInBloo]

6. But they're all over $400 haircuts and candidates' boobies.

[rodeodance]

4. February 2006, Gonzales sent the panel a six-page, single-spaced letter to "clarify" six major point

......Over the past 2 1/2 years, lawmakers have accused Gonzales of dissembling on many topics, including civil liberties abuses under the USA Patriot Act and his role in reviewing aggressive interrogation tactics. After a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in February 2006, Gonzales sent the panel a six-page, single-spaced letter to "clarify" six major points of testimony, including his erroneous claim that the Justice Department had never undertaken a legal analysis of domestic wiretapping.

[rodeodance]

5. Recall that Gonzo has opportunity to make corrections this time also

[Canuckistanian]

7. I think the long knives are being unsheathed

The WaPo story is anything but controversial. These facts have been out there for a while.

But put together like this on the front page - makes you wonder....

[DeepModem Mom]

8. That's true. The WP is not going to put the headline on this that a blogger would...

or write the same story. But the WP is saying, on page one, that the Atty General of the U.S. is a habitual liar -- that this man who is supposed to be the chief protector of the law, lies even under oath.

[SnowGoose]

9. It was 1996 when AG helped Bush hush up his DUI

Maybe now people will go back and give that episode a closer look

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6857224/site/newsweek/

[DeepModem Mom]

10. Indeed! At the end of the article, that episode is covered --

"Questions about Gonzales's willingness to shade the truth on Bush's behalf came to prominence in the 1996 episode in which Bush was excused from Texas jury duty in a drunken-driving case. Bush was then the state's governor, and Gonzales was his general counsel. If Bush had served, he probably would have had to disclose his own drunken-driving conviction in Maine two decades earlier.

The judge, prosecutor and defense attorney involved in the case have said that Gonzales met with the judge and argued that jury service would pose a potential conflict of interest for Bush, who could be asked to pardon the defendant. Gonzales has disputed that account. He made no mention of meeting with the judge in a written statement submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee."