Murray Waas, over at National Journal, adds to Alberto Gonzales’ woes. It’s another one of those complicated simple stories, and the gist is this: Gonzales knew that an internal Justice Department investigation would likely end up focusing on him, nevertheless, he went to Bush and got him to shut it down.
From National Journal:
Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.
It is unclear whether the president knew at the time of his decision that the Justice inquiry — to be conducted by the department’s internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility — would almost certainly examine the conduct of his attorney general….
Current and former Justice Department officials, as well as experts in legal ethics, question the propriety of Gonzales’s continuing to advise Bush about the investigation after learning that it might examine his own actions. The attorney general, they say, was remiss if he did not disclose that information to the president. But if Gonzales did inform Bush about the possibility and the president responded by stymieing the probe, that would raise even more-serious questions as to whether Bush acted to protect Gonzales, they said.
Update: Here’s some background on how baseless and brazen Bush’s removal of security clearances for the investigators was.
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