A second helping of Gonzales

Looks like you've got some 'splaining to do, Alberto!

From Patrick Leahy's office:

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.

I've got an idea for the committee. Clearly, open-ended questions are too challenging for the Attorney General. Let's give him a multiple choice exam.

Were those US Attorneys fired for:

A. NO reason at all.

These Attorneys do, after all, serve at the "pleasure of the President" as we've heard about 10,000 times by now. So if Abu and his staff have the time, inclination and chutzpah to fuck around with, fire and defame good attorneys because of the way the wind tickles their balls in the morning, there's nothing illegal about that.

It does speak to their judgement, priorities and human decency though, and the voters should know that's how they roll in the Bush administration.

B. A GOOD reason.

There's nothing illegal about that. We're just curious what it was, though. Humor us.

B. A BAD reason.

Anyone that cares to put the pieces together about competitive districts, witch-hunts for non-existent voter fraud cases, suspicious corruption case manipulations, deleted emails, and secretly inserted Patriot Act provisions for appointing US Attorneys without Congressional Approval is starting to see what these replacements were about. And, again, there's nothing inherently illegal about it.

So just come out and say it, already.