Gonzales must go
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should resign or be fired by President Bush. That’s because he lied to the Senate about his role in firing eight U.S. attorneys. He said March 13 that he was removed from the process, but recently released documents show that he attended a planning meeting last November about the dismissals, which appeared to be mostly on political grounds. And last week, his former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, testified that Mr. Gonzales was well-informed about the process from the start.
We can’t have Cabinet officers lying to Congress. Period.
Now, politics intrudes into the matter of U.S. attorneys – both in their appointments and sometimes, unfortunately, in the practice of their duties. We shouldn’t forget that President Clinton fired all 93 U.S. attorneys when he took office, replacing them with people friendly to his administration.
But the timing of such changes is important. The Bush administration – or at least Mr. Gonzales – has crossed the line in the way it has gone after apparently politically uncooperative U.S. attorneys in the midst of sensitive cases. Even though U.S. attorneys are political appointees, the vast majority try to conduct themselves in a professional and disinterested way once they’re in office. The firings last fall can only serve to discourage such independence.
Foes of the administration have also said that Mr. Gonzales should go because of how he has overseen investigations of alleged terrorism, calling into question his respect for civil liberties as well as his management abilities. More broadly, they have asserted that he has conducted himself too much as an adjunct of Karl Rove, the president’s political adviser, and not enough as a rigorous and fair administrator of the Justice Department. Those are murkier matters to debate.
What is clear, however, is Mr. Gonzales’s dishonesty in responding to inquiries from Congress. That just can’t be tolerated, especially from someone charged with helping to run America’s justice system.