On the off chance there is anyone out there who continues to harbor doubts as to whether Alberto Gonzales is a liar, I present you with a rather blantant example of the man's dishonesty that, for reasons I can't quite understand, doesn't seem to have been reported anywhere.

On December 14, 2005, Alberto Gonzales participated in an online question and answer session for the Washington Post. One of the questioners made the following comment:

I have a vague memory of reports of thousands of wire taps, many without the required authorization.

To which Gonzales responded:

You mention wiretaps. All wiretaps must be authorized by a federal judge. In addition, investigators must show probable cause and comply with other requirements before the court may authorize the wiretap. This has always been the case, and the PATRIOT Act did nothing to diminish these safeguards.

Two days later, on December 16, 2005, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times published their blockbuster story revealing that the Bush Administration had been wiretapping U.S. citizens without warrants for years.

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Another Friday, another document dump from the DOJ. As I was scanning through this set, I came across this one from Monica "I plead the Fifth" Goodling. Notice the instruction in boldface (see below the fold for full size image):

Yes, that's an instruction to delete documents. And notice the date: February 12, 2007. That's well after Congress began investigating this matter. I don't believe any subpoenas or document requests had yet been issued (someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that), but it was pretty clear by then that document requests were likely.

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Alberto Gonzales's long-awaited appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee has been postponed until Thursday in light of the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Rather than trying to comment on that tragedy (I wouldn't even know what to say), I thought I'd take the opportunity presented by the delay in Gonzales' testimony to suggest a few lines of questioning that the Senators on the Judiciary Committee might wish to pursue.

With all due respect to those Senators, I haven't been terribly impressed by their cross-examination skills in past hearings. Good lines of questioning, particularly in the context of a Congressional hearing, are ones that are capable of boxing the witness into a corner and forcing him to make an important concession, no matter which way he chooses to answer the question. To do that, you have to anticipate the witness's possible answers and be prepared to proceed in different directions depending on how the witness responds. Too often Senators get flustered and lose their train of thought when the witness doesn't answer their initial, deeply penetrating question in quite the way they had expected, and they end up just moving on to the next question.

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The White House has acknowledged that many years' worth of official email--which is required by law to be preserved--has been "lost." The reason it was lost is because many White House staffers, most notably Karl Rove, have conducted much of their official business over the years on private RNC-sponsored email accounts that routinely purged old email. The White House has attempted to mitigate its culpability for this blatant violation of the Presidential Records Act by arguing that it was the byproduct of a good faith effort to comply with another law, the Hatch Act, which prohibits conducting certain partisan political activity on government time. As White House spokesperson Dana Perino put it:

What I know -- I checked into this -- is that certain White House officials and staff members who have responsibilities that straddle both worlds, that have responsibilities in communication, regular interface with political organizations, do have a separate email account for those political communications. That is entirely appropriate, especially when you think of it in this case, that the practice is in place and followed precisely to avoid any inadvertent violations of what is called the Hatch Act. And so there are some members of the administration that do straddle both worlds. And so under an abundance of caution so that they don't violate the Hatch Act, they have these separate emails.

The goal here is to portray these White House staffers as honest civil servants trying their best to comply with two contradictory sets of legal mandates. And the White House has actually been pretty successful at selling this line, as evidenced by this paragraph from a recent New York Times story:

At issue is how the White House complies with two seemingly competing laws. One is the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which requires the administration to ensure that its decisions and deliberations are “adequately documented” and that records flowing out of those decisions are preserved. The other is the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal officials from engaging in political business on government time.

But here's the thing. It's just not true. The Hatch Act and the Presidential Records Act are not "competing" laws. It's remarkably easy to comply with both. All you have to do is preserve your official communications.

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In today's New York Post, conservative columnist John Podhoretz offered some free advice to Democrats:

In pursuit of a short-term political benefit, Democrats are in danger of establishing a ruinous new standard in American politics - one they'll come to regret and rue when they take the White House again. . . .

By inflating the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys into a major political scandal with the suggestion that the act of dismissing them is a scandal demanding congressional oversight, they're creating a new political reality. . . .

The longer this goes on, the easier it will be for pseudoscandals to be ginned up in the future whenever a certain type of official working in the executive branch is removed from his job.

Ah yes, Democrats will surely rue the day they created this "new political reality" where "pseudoscandals" can be "ginned up" by their political opponents. Was Podhoretz in a coma during the entire Clinton administration? The "political reality" during the 1990s was that just about anything the Clinton administration did, no matter how routine or unremarkable, was considered scandalous by Republicans in Congress, who would immediately convene hearings, issue subpoenas, and demand the appointment of an independent counsel.

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Update: I wanted to welcome Anonymous Liberal to C&L. He blogged with Glenn Greenwald and will offer us some solid legal opinions from time to time... John Amato

President Bush is in a real bind. The circumstances surrounding the firing of eight United States Attorneys reek so badly of crass partisan politics that the President's advisers are trying very hard to distance him as much as possible from the decision-making process. Hence, this from Tony Snow:

MR. SNOW: The President has no recollection of this ever being raised with him. . . .

Q Just to follow, did you say, again for the record, that the President has no recollection of ever being asked about any of this?

MR. SNOW: Yes, the removal -- yes, that is correct.

Indeed, Snow went as far as to assert that this was "a decision that was made at the U.S. Department of Justice."

Here's the problem, though. As Marty Lederman points out, the relevant statute--28 U.S.C. 541(c)--vests the power to remove U.S. Attorneys with the president ("Each United States attorney is subject to removal by the President.") As we've repeatedly been told, U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President--not the pleasure of the Attorney General (and certainly not the pleasure of the Attorney General's chief of staff). The decision to fire a U.S. Attorney--much less eight of them--is unquestionably one for the president to make, so if President Bush was truly out of the loop on this, that's a problem in and of itself.

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