Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should resign, a majority of Americans say in a new poll, and White House aides should be forced to testify before Congress about their involvement in the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys.
In a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll conducted Thursday through Monday, 53 percent of respondents said Gonzales should quit his post. Seventy-four percent said White House staff members who had discussions about the firings with Gonzales’ chief of staff should testify under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which the White House has refused to allow.
Still, a strong majority in the survey, 63 percent, said they believe the Democratic-led Congress is seeking political gain in the investigations of the attorney dismissals, unauthorized wiretapping of U.S. citizens and substandard conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Only 28 percent said the inquiries were driven by concern over ethics.
“People tend to be cynical about these government investigations,” said Susan Pinkus, the Los Angeles Times polling director. “Whether they think it’s for political advantage or not, they want to get to the truth.”
The poll of 1,373 adults has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
On Tuesday, Democrats subpoenaed Gonzales for more documents. The subpoena, issued a week before Gonzales was scheduled to testify before Congress about the dismissals, seeks hundreds of documents either withheld or heavily blacked out by his department. The subpoena sets a Monday deadline for Gonzales to produce the documents.
“We have been patient in allowing the department to work through its concerns regarding the sensitive nature of some of these materials,” House Judiciary Committee chairman John Con yers, D-Mich., wrote Gonzales in a letter with the subpoena. “Unfortunately, the department has not indicated any meaningful willingness to find a way to meet our legitimate needs.”
Conyers characterized the subpoena as a last resort after weeks of negotiations with the Justice Department over documents and e-mails the committee wants in its pursuit of whether any of the firings were improper.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse stopped short of saying the department would fight the subpoena. But he said legal concerns about violating privacy rights of people mentioned in the documents have kept Justice from releasing them.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
