Republicans give Gonzales more cover this time around

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was in much friendlier territory yesterday during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on the U.S. attorneys controversy than he was during a searing all-day session three weeks ago before the panel’s Senate counterpart.

 Unlike the Senate Republicans who aggressively grilled Gonzales last month, House Republicans echoed Gonzales’s call for the investigation to end and snapped into action whenever they felt Democrats had maligned the attorney general.

{mosads}Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the committee’s ranking member, argued that the two-month investigation had tried to criminalize politics.

 “As we have gone forward, the list of accusations has mushroomed,” Smith said in his opening remarks. “But the evidence of genuine wrongdoing has not.”

Democrats still snarled, bellowed and pounded the table in frustration when they tried to get answers on who recommended the 2006 firings of eight U.S. attorneys, and why they did so.

Gonzales repeatedly took responsibility for the firings. But in several instances, he said he could not answer specific questions because he had not talked to key officials in order to respect the confidentiality of an ongoing internal Justice Department investigation into the matter.

Even before the hearing began, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), the panel’s chairman, personally told a number of costumed “Code Pink” protesters to leave because he didn’t think the signs and symbols on their garments were dignified. By contrast, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) was much more lenient with protesters who heckled and hissed throughout last month’s hearing.

Lawmakers almost immediately took the pressure off Gonzales and began sparring with each other over the status of Justice Department investigations into the activities of two sitting congressmen.

 Just minutes into the hearing, Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) demanded answers from Gonzales about the perceived lack of progress in the FBI probe of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.).

“My constituents are asking me when something is going to happen, whether an indictment is going to be returned or whether the Justice Department is going to make an announcement that there’s insufficient evidence to prosecute Representative Jefferson,” Sensenbrenner said. 

Gonzales responded that Sensenbrenner, the former chairman of the panel, knew that he could not talk about ongoing investigations.

“Well, everybody’s talking about it except you,” Sensenbrenner retorted. “I’m just interested in finding out when this matter is going to be brought to conclusion, because we authorize and appropriate a heck of a lot of money to run your department and people are wondering what the dickens is going on.”       
  
Gonzales answered he “had every confidence” that the prosecutors in the case will follow the evidence and take action at the appropriate time.

 Unsatisfied, Sensenbrenner then asked whether Gonzales believed the raid on Jefferson’s office and the legal dispute over the separation of powers that it sparked had slowed a decision on whether to indict Jefferson.
Gonzales said only that he couldn’t comment but would do so at the appropriate time.

Sensenbrenner said angrily: “Well, I would hope that the appropriate time would be pretty soon, because the people’s confidence in your department has been further eroded, separate and apart from the U.S. attorney controversy, because of the delay in dealing with this matter.”

The exchange took place after a dust-up over Rep. Linda Sanchez’s (D-Calif.) comments on an FBI investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), and whether the October 2006 departure of U.S. Attorney Debra Wong Yang, who was leading the probe, was related to the other prosecutors’ firings in December. Yang resigned her position to take a partnership at a law firm defending Lewis in the probe. Yang, a single mother, has told The Hill that she took the job mainly for financial reasons and that her departure would not affect the case.

Sanchez asked Gonzales whether he was concerned about the conflict of interest that Yang’s new job may have raised. He responded: “We had nothing to do with placing Ms. Yang in that law firm. And as far as I know, nothing about that investigation has been impacted or affected in any way by virtue of her going to work in that firm.”

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) then interjected when Sanchez attempted to place into the hearing record a New York Times article raising questions about Yang’s departure.

Lungren took exception to Sanchez’s statement that Lewis was a “target” of an investigation and argued there was no proof of that.

“We ought to be careful about that before we start besmirching members’ names around,” he said.

Following Sensenbrenner’s comments about the Jefferson probe, Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) raised a point of order asking to “take down” Sanchez’s remarks that Lewis was a target, a process of removing the words from the hearing record.

 Sanchez apologized if she had referred to him as a target and agreed to strike it from the record.

Gonzales was also asked about Todd Graves, the former U.S. attorney for Kansas City, Mo., and denied that his early 2006 departure had anything to do with the review and ousting of the other eight U.S. attorneys late in the year. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Graves was asked to leave in January 2006, many months before the other firings occurred.

Gonzales had previously testified that just eight U.S. attorneys were fired and repeated that assertion under questioning yesterday.

At the end of the hearing, Conyers said he was still unsatisfied and asked for Gonzales to produce more answers and documents about the White House’s involvement in the firings.

“I am disappointed that you still cannot answer the basic questions of who put the U.S. attorneys on the firing list and why … the bread crumbs that we referred to earlier seem to be leading to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”