The three stooges

The president won't fire Alberto Gonzales. He needs him to protect White House secrets, including the scheming roles of Cheney and Rove.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Read more: Congress, Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, Department of Justice, Opinion, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Miers, U.S. Attorneys

Photos: AP/Wide World

Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Dick Cheney. A Salon photo composite

Aug. 2, 2007 | Omertà (or a code of silence) has become the final bond holding the Bush administration together. Honesty is dishonorable; silence is manly; penitence is weakness. Loyalty trumps law. Protecting higher-ups is patriotism. Stonewalling is idealism. Telling the truth is informing. Cooperation with investigators is cowardice; breaking the code is betrayal. Once the code is shattered, however, no one can be trusted and the entire edifice crumbles.

If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were miraculously to tell the truth, or if he were to resign or be removed, the secret government of the past six years would be unlocked. So long as a Republican Congress rigorously engaged in enforcing no oversight was smugly complicit through its passive ignorance and abdication of constitutional responsibility, the White House was secure in enacting its theories of the imperial presidency. An executive bound only by his self-proclaimed fiat in his capacity as commander in chief became his own law in authorizing torture and warrantless domestic wiretapping and data mining. Following the notion of the unitary executive, in which the departments and agencies have no independent existence under the president, the White House has relentlessly politicized them. Callow political appointees dictate to scientists, censoring or altering their conclusions. Career staff professionals are forced to attend indoctrination sessions on the political strategies of the Republican Party in campaigns and elections. And U.S. attorneys, supposedly impartial prosecutors representing the Department of Justice in the states, are purged if they deviate in any way from the White House's political line.

Last week, for example, the Washington Post reported that William R. Steiger, director of the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, suppressed the 2006 "Call to Action on Global Health" report of U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, which explained the connection of poverty to health and urged that attacking diseases become a major U.S. international commitment. Steiger, who has no credentials in the field, is the son of a former congressman who was Vice President Cheney's earliest patron, giving Cheney his first congressional job as a staff intern. At the White House's behest, Steiger acts as a micromanaging political commissar. His insistence on approving every single overseas appointee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has left many of its posts empty. "Only 166 of the CDC's 304 overseas positions in 53 countries are filled," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in April. "At least 85 positions likely will remain unfilled until 2008." Such is the theory of the unitary executive in action.

Just this week, Jeffrey Toobin wrote in the New Yorker about the suspicion that fell on the U.S. attorney in Washington state, John McKay, who was fired in the wholesale purge because of his interest in devoting full resources to an investigation of the murder of an assistant U.S. attorney, Tom Wales, who had been a prominent local advocate of gun control. On July 31, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, Va., John Brownlee, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the night before a guilty verdict was delivered in his case against the drug manufacturing company that produced OxyContin, he received a call from a Justice Department official asking him to slow down his prosecution.

On Wednesday, Bush prepared to invoke executive privilege to protect his senior political aide, Karl Rove, and Rove's deputy, J. Scott Jennings, from testifying before Congress on the firing of the U.S. attorneys. Bush has already covered his chief of staff, Josh Bolten, and former counsel Harriet Miers with executive privilege to prevent their testimony. The House Judiciary Committee responded by citing both for contempt of Congress, which requires action by the U.S. attorney of the District of Columbia. But the Justice Department has declared that it will thwart that process, in effect rendering the nation's system of justice a political arm of the executive.

Bush has steadfastly refused to fire Attorney General Gonzales, even though Gonzales' former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, directly contradicted Gonzales' testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he knew nothing about the purge of U.S. attorneys and by documentation that Gonzales' claim that they were dismissed for "performance" was a politically contrived excuse. In protecting Gonzales, Bush is shielding the true author of the purge -- Rove, who informed and received the approval of Bush himself.

Last week, after Gonzales had testified for the second time before Congress that there was no internal dissent against the authorization of warrantless domestic spying, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that Gonzales' statement was false and offered himself as proof of someone who had opposed the program that Gonzales said had won universal support. James Comey, the deputy attorney general in Bush's first term, had described the now-infamous "Enzo the Baker" scene of March 2004, when Comey, serving as acting attorney general, and Mueller rushed to a Washington hospital to intercept then White House counsel Gonzales, who tried to browbeat Attorney General John Ashcroft, drugged and in pain after emergency surgery, into signing his approval of the wiretapping. Ashcroft refused. Comey confronted President Bush on the program's illegality and it was modified. Yet, in his latest testimony, Gonzales not only contradicted Comey's version but also claimed that the operation was about "other intelligence activities."

Gonzales' unashamed performance prompted senators to demand that the second-ranking Justice Department official, Solicitor General Paul Clement, appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Gonzales' potential perjury, and members of the House to file a resolution asking the Judiciary Committee to launch impeachment proceedings.

The mystery surrounding Gonzales' position deepened with the bizarre attempted defense of Gonzales offered by Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, who sent a letter Tuesday to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., explaining that the warrantless wiretapping was part of a much larger surveillance program authorized by a single executive order of the president. If this is true, then Gonzales' past efforts to describe the policy as narrow and relatively small are false. This defense, therefore, provided grist for further incrimination and failed to shine any light on Gonzales' patently misleading testimony.

Gonzales is a unique figure of disrepute in the history of the Justice Department, a cipher, enabler and useful idiot who was nonetheless indispensable in the rise of his patron and whose survival is elemental to that of the administration. Warren G. Harding's attorney general, Harry Daugherty, trailing accusations of bribery for which he was never indicted, resigned after Harding's death. Daugherty had been one of Harding's creators as the Republican Party chairman of Ohio. Two of Richard Nixon's attorneys general resigned in disgrace during the Watergate scandal, both significant political men: John Mitchell, Nixon's former law partner and campaign chairman, and Richard Kleindienst, an important player in the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party of Arizona.

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