Washington – The Senate Judiciary Committee postponed today’s questioning of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the firings of eight federal prosecutors, saying the proceedings would be inappropriate in light of the Virginia Tech University shootings.
Committee chairman Patrick Leahy made the decision Monday to postpone the long-awaited hearing that has been considered Gonzales’ last chance to quiet a controversy that has prompted calls in both parties for his resignation.
Leahy said the hearing had been rescheduled for Thursday. He said he made the decision after conferring with Gonzales and the committee’s senior Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
“All three of us agree,” he said.
“I’m sure that he will want to be dealing with the matters of the shooting,” Leahy said of Gonzales.
Gonzales’ efforts to clarify his role in the prosecutors’ firing may be imperiled by conflicts between his prepared Senate testimony and details already released by the Justice Department and former aides.
“I never sought to mislead or deceive the Congress or the American people about my role in this matter,” Gonzales wrote in the 25-page statement, which was released Sunday. “I do acknowledge however that at times I have been less than precise with my words when discussing the resignations.”
The Senate panel, which oversees the Justice Department, is investigating whether the firings were politically motivated.
Democrats and Republicans have called for Gonzales to resign, questioning his credibility over shifting explanations on how involved he was in the process.
On Monday, the conservative American Freedom Agenda also urged Gonzales to step down, calling him an “unsuitable steward of the law.”
The contradictions continue in Gonzales’ prepared testimony, including:
His assertion that the process to replace underperforming U.S. attorneys began “shortly after the 2004 election and soon after I became attorney general.”
According to an e-mail written on Jan. 9, 2005, before Gonzales was confirmed as attorney general, Department of Justice aide Kyle Sampson wrote that he and Gonzales had discussed replacing prosecutors “a couple of weeks ago.”
Gonzales’ recollection that he was briefed sporadically through the process of reviewing which prosecutors would be replaced. His prepared testimony says those updates, described as “brief (and) relatively few in number,” focused primarily on the review process itself.
Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 29 that he remembered discussions with Gonzales regarding “this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign.” Sampson left the Justice Department over the controversy March 12.
Gonzales’ assertion that he was not involved in selecting who would replace the targeted prosecutors. “I do not recall making any decision, either on or before Dec. 7, 2006, about who should replace the U.S. attorneys who were asked to resign that day,” he says in the prepared testimony.
But Sampson, the attorney general’s chief of staff, had compiled a list nearly a year earlier of names of possible replacements.
In his March 13 comments about the firings, Gonzales said he “was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on.”
That was contradicted by e-mails showing he attended a Nov. 27, 2006, meeting about the dismissals.
