Tomorrow's the Day

UPDATE--Boy, I screwed up the time stamp completely on this one. I started writing it Wednesday night, so the Tomorrow in the title referring to Thursday, but then I didn't actually post it until early Thursday morning, which made that tomorrow today. Then, in adjusting the time stamp to reflect when the post was actually going up, I mistakenly made it PM instead of AM, suggesting that this was really a statement from 12 hours in the future. That's not wise when my opening line refers to 24 hours, but with the jump ahead in time would really have been 12 hours (unless I was asking if he'd still be AG on Friday afternoon). I've corrected the time stamp now, but since the title was already there, I'm leaving it as it was--just remember, he's testifying on Thursday, not Friday. And now, back to the original post.

I'm taking bets. Will Alberto Gonzales still be attorney general 24 hours from now? My immediate reaction is that nothing will move that quickly, but that doesn't take into account just how deep a hole Gonzales is in. He's contradicted himself in various statements, but more threatening to him is the testimony of his former aide Kyle Sampson. There have been a few leaks (here's The New York Times, McClatchy, the online The Wall Street Journal), but the gist is that Sampson has testified under oath that Gonzales has knowingly told lies to Congress. I'm going out on a limb here, but that seems like a big deal. And it's not just careless untruths, but this has the scent of a full-fledged cover-up. Gonzales has carefully been keeping his and his bosses names out of the conversation, but at this point, if neither he nor the Prez had any idea of what was going on, then they're inept administrators who have no idea what's actually happening behind the locked doors that you know the Bushies have to favor. TPMmuckraker has a nice summation of the inconsistencies of Gonzales's various stories from a couple of days ago. My favorite is Sampson's claim that Gonzales told him about the details of a conversation about Senator Pete Domenici and former prosecutor David Iglesias that he'd had with the Prez. A couple of weeks later, he went on the record with the claim that he didn't even remember having such a conversation, let alone the content of it. But according to the Justice Department, that's not a contradiction. Gonzales never remembered anything about the meeting, even when he was describing it to Sampson. He was just passing along what other people had told him about the meeting that he attended. Yeah, that's the ticket!

One smaller development that hasn't really seen a lot of play is the fact that the House Judiciary Committee was intending to vote on whether or not to give former Justice Department insider Monica Goodling immunity to testify. While she was still on the government payroll, she declared that she'd take the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify on the grounds that it may incriminate her. It was not until a week later that she resigned from her post, suggesting that at the very least the Bush administration had couldn't decide whether it considered withholding information from Congress to be a firing offense. Today the House committee delayed that vote for a week, however, to, in the words of Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, "enable the Minority to join us in taking this critical step in our efforts to uncover the truth about why the U.S. Attorneys were terminated and what it means for the integrity of federal law enforcement." Actually, the Republicans are waiting to see which way the wind is blowing--or, more importantly, whether Alberto will fall on his sword. If that problem takes care of itself, Monica Goodling's testimony isn't nearly so important. But if he remains in his post, House Republicans may be less enthused about appearing to keep the truth hidden.

It's a big day for Alberto on Thursday. Whether it happens tomorrow or in the next few days, my money's on the AG taking the bullet for his President. After all, that's what he's there for.