Washington – In a widening storm over the firings of federal prosecutors, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales admitted Tuesday that “mistakes were made” and promised accountability but pleaded ignorance of the details of the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys.
Gonzales, a longtime confidant of President Bush, said he wouldn’t step down in the face of criticism of his management of the Justice Department.
Gonzales has come under increasingly harsh scrutiny as new information about the politically tinged circumstances of the firings has come to light. And last week, the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report documenting the FBI’s abuse of surveillance powers under the USA Patriot Act, raising new questions about Gonzales’s ability to lead the agency.
“I am here because I’ve learned from my mistakes, because I accept responsibility, and because I’m committed to doing my job, and that is what I intend to do here on behalf of the American people,” Gonzales said at a news conference.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Gonzales’ acceptance of responsibility didn’t go far enough, and he repeated a call for Gonzales to step down.
“His time in office should be over,” Schumer said. “The U.S. attorney scandal and all the other instances where the attorney general did not protect the rule of law are just too great a weight for the office to bear.”
Even as he acknowledged responsibility for the scandal over the firing of the prosecutors, Gonzales insisted he did not know the particulars of a plan to dismiss prosecutors that was coordinated by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, who resigned Monday.
The Justice Department had characterized the involvement of the White House as minimal, but in recent days, the House Judiciary Committee has released e-mails and other documents that show heavy involvement by former White House counsel Harriet Miers and other top presidential aides.
In 2005, Miers asked Sampson about the feasibility of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys, a plan that was rejected as too disruptive. Instead, the White House and Sampson settled on a plan to evaluate and rank U.S. attorneys and fire those deemed to be “underperforming,” according to those documents. Such status included being regarded as insufficiently loyal to Bush or Gonzales.
White House counselor Dan Bartlett said the White House did not seek to add to or subtract names from a Justice Department list of prosecutors to be dismissed.
Bartlett acknowledged that Bush had passed along to Gonzales complaints from members of Congress about some attorneys’ performance but that he didn’t tell the attorney general how to handle them.
Gonzales is “a stand-up guy” who retains Bush’s support, Bartlett said, adding that “the president has all the confidence in the world in Alberto Gonzales.”
