Washington – President Bush reaffirmed his support for embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Saturday amid growing pressure for Gonzales’ resignation.
Gonzales faces a difficult week after internal Justice Department e-mails released late Friday indicated he was more involved than he has acknowledged in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year.
Gonzales has insisted that he was essentially in the dark about the dismissals, but the e-mails showed he took part in an hour- long meeting about the firings 10 days before they were carried out.
Congressional investigators will get a chance to learn more about Gonzales’ role in the dismissals Thursday, when Kyle Sampson, the attorney general’s former chief of staff, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Panel members want to know whether any of the prosecutors were fired because they failed to go after Democrats or were considered too tough on Republicans.
While Senate Democrats prepared their attack lines for this morning’s TV talk shows, Bush defended the firings and the attorney general in his Saturday radio address. Congressional investigators continued to examine e-mails and other documents that were delivered to Congress by the Justice Department on Friday night.
Bush said the prosecutors were pushed out because “the Justice Department determined that new leadership in several of these positions would better serve the country.” Bush taped the radio address Friday, before the latest document release, but a White House spokeswoman said the internal e-mails did not shake the president’s support. Bush and Gonzales have a mutual loyalty that goes back more than a decade, when Bush was governor of Texas and Gonzales was his lawyer.
While a handful of congressional Republicans have joined the call for Gonzales’ ouster, lawmakers in both parties agreed his resignation would not resolve the core dispute over whether federal prosecutors were subjected to improper political pressure.
