Posted on 07/10/2007 9:22:01 PM PDT by Santa Fe_Conservative
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Embattled U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced a new firestorm on Tuesday sparked by a report he may have misled lawmakers in 2005 about civil liberty violations by the FBI.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, responded by promising that Gonzales would face tough questions about this and other matters at a hearing planned by his panel later this month.
And Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who chairs a House Judiciary subcommittee, renewed calls for Gonzales to resign and called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to determine if he had misled Congress, "a serious crime."
But President George W. Bush brushed off the flap about his longtime friend, who earlier served as White House counsel.
"The president has said repeatedly that he has great faith in the attorney general, and that has not changed," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Gonzales assured Congress in 2005 that the FBI had not abused powers granted under the anti-terror USA Patriot Act despite having received reports of potential violations. Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for Gonzales, told reporters he did not know whether the attorney general had read the reports sent to the president's Intelligence Oversight Board.
But Roehrkasse and other Justice Department officials denied that Gonzales had given misleading testimony. "Just because the FBI makes a referral to (the board) does not necessarily mean somebody's civil liberties has been abused," Roehrkasse said.
Gonzales has drawn fire from Congress on a number of fronts, from the administration's treatment of detainees to its warrantless domestic spying program to his controversial firing last year of nine top federal prosecutors.
"This should be the last straw, but there never seems to be a last straw when it comes to George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales," said Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat.
With Bush's support, Gonzales has fended off bipartisan calls to resign. He has promised to remain chief U.S. law enforcement officer as long as he believes he is effective and the president backs him.
---said the man who took a $3 million campaign bribe from the Clintons for voting against impeachment.
No way GWB fires Gonzalez.
“said the man who took a $3 million campaign bribe from the Clintons for voting against impeachment.”
Schumer needed to be bribed to vote against impeachment? I doubt it.
Yawn...
> “This should be the last straw, but there never seems to
> be a last straw when it comes to George W. Bush
Exactly.
The DemoncRats are never done fighting their “enemy” no matter how many times they have to cover the same ground.
In the mean time, the REAL enemies of this country are formulating their next attack, which is likely to affect more of the DemoncRat consituency than the Repuglican one.
But they will all blame it on Bush, even after he leaves office.
Let’s see. Clinton fires 90 some odd atty’s and no media hype. President Bush fires 8 and all H*** breaks out?
What am I missing here
>>Let’s see. Clinton fires 90 some odd atty’s and no media hype. President Bush fires 8 and all H*** breaks out?
What am I missing here<<
There are other concerns about Gonzales. I’ve always felt the President should be free to pick his staff and so firing prosecutors doesn’t bother me.
What worries me about Gonzales is his patterns of justifications of the abuse of individual rights, particularly with regard to torture.
How funny . Gonzales thought he had struck a deal with the Dims to leave him alone . Gonzales begged anti-gun Dims to give him (AG and future AG’s) sole power to decide who can lawfully purchase firearms ! In turn they would let him stay with a simple “vote of no confidence” . Looks like the Dims left him alone for about a month and now they are back for more ...LOL !
Why are people supporting this guy ?
Gonzales is anti-gun and pro-Amnesty, he needs to step down .
Paging John Ashcroft ! Come back , we need you !
Let’s see. Clinton fires 90 some odd atty’s and no media hype. President Bush fires 8 and all H*** breaks out?
What am I missing here
Ones a Dem and the other’s not!
GWB should have cleaned house when he took over the oval office. Instead he wanted a ‘new tone’ in DC. This is where his new tone has brought him. Old Clintonistas undermining him at every turn ever since he took the oath of office. I hope when we have a new Republican in the White House he will suss out the traitors in our midst and get rid of them! The Clintons stacked the deck with all their cronies and GWB left many in place. I hope that we conservatives have learned our lesson. We (conservatives) are at war with the terrorists and the Dems are only at war with conservatives.
I think the Dem’s are at war with the American people ....and America in general ....
You are right: Yawn ...
Doesn’t matter, everything bad that has happened over the past 1000 years, and everything that will happen in the next 1000 years will be laid a Bushes feet.
Whatever would’ve helped him buy the Senate seat out from Al D’Amato, he’d have done it.
Are you referring to the "torture" that US military personnel go through in their training, or are you referring to something more extreme? If so, what, exactly????
>>But the torture thing was really not defined. What is torture? Listening to Madonna would be torture or some heavy metal band at 100db’s would be torture .... I don’t think we’re into physical hurting though ... mental deprivation maybe ... listening to children’s songs ......<<
I agree about how the term torture can be exagerated.
But Gonzales personally made the Justice department ruling (The memo of January 25, 2002) that said that protections that would prevent torture did not apply to anyone captured in Afghanistan. The Presidential order of February 7 backing up Gonzalez (and a similar ruling by Rumsfeld) was what opened the door to tactics like using pain to coerce speech, feigned drowning to force confessions, hanging by the wrists and forced insertions of objects into the rectum.
This made me no longer trust Gonzalez and Rumsfeld although I continued to trust the President hoping he was given bad advice.
>>Let’s see. Clinton fires 90 some odd atty’s and no media hype. President Bush fires 8 and all H*** breaks out?
What am I missing here<<
Do you guys pay attention at all? Using that as a defense just makes you sound ignorant. Rush isn’t even using that one anymore. GWB fired ALL USAs in the same way that Clinton did when he came into office. All presidents do that.
Can you substantiate that?
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