Ken Salazar was wrong about Alberto Gonzales. He had met him a few times and thought he knew the guy. He liked him.
It was a rookie mistake.
In his very first public act as a U.S. senator, Salazar endorsed President Bush’s nomination of Gonzales for attorney general, even going so far as to introduce him to the Senate Judiciary Committee personally.
It was an audacious move. He immediately rejected the Democratic Party leadership – and not discreetly.
He was putting his reputation on the line very publicly, staking out his territory as an independent, and he was standing up for a friend.
Even then Gonzales didn’t seem to deserve his support.
In January 2005, most of Gonzales’ critics focused on his role in rationalizing torture in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. He was the guy who called the Geneva Conventions’ protections of prisoners of war “quaint” and “obsolete.”
Just like his eager justifications for using the death penalty in questionable cases in Texas when Bush was governor, Gonzales seemed to exhibit a cavalier attitude about human rights and a willingness to flout the law for crass political expedience.
I called a longtime colleague of Salazar’s back in 2005 and asked why the senator was crossing the aisle for a Republican hack with baggage dating back at least to 1996, when he got Bush out of jury duty so he wouldn’t have to come clean about an old DUI charge.
Was he nuts? I wondered.
She told me that Salazar had proven himself to be politically astute and a shrewd judge of character. Maybe he saw something in this son of a migrant farmworker, she said. Maybe he knew something we didn’t.
On Monday, the senator didn’t admit to misjudging the man. Instead he reminded reporters that in May he had called on Gonzales to resign.
“The Department of Justice should never be used as a political pawn in the agenda of the White House,” he said. “The right thing was for the attorney general to step down.” Now the president will have the “opportunity to appoint someone who will restore the confidence the American people need in the Department of Justice,” blah, blah, blah.
It was standard-issue talking points.
Salazar didn’t say that the first Latino attorney general had been an embarrassment. He didn’t say he had been used by the guy.
He didn’t have to.
In political-speak, his assessment of Gonzales’ performance was scathing.
Salazar said he expected “independence” and “backbone” from an attorney general.
An AG needed to be able to “stand up and let the president know when he is going over the line in the law.” He needed to know that his job was to “stand up for the rule of law.”
When he didn’t see that from Gonzales, Salazar said he called for his resignation. That was the last time he spoke to the attorney general – his friend – personally, he said.
I asked Salazar if he thought that Gonzales had been treated unfairly, that his name had been “dragged through the mud,” as the president had said.
“No” was his response. “I think the attorney general did two things fundamentally wrong.”
One was that Gonzales “failed to exercise the independence that is inherent in the position as lead law enforcement officer.”
In plain English, that means he was a toady, a stooge.
The other mistake was his handling of the firings of U.S. attorneys, which were “tinged with political overtones from the White House.”
Among them, Salazar said, was former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, who was “let go because of political motivations. That should never have been allowed to happen.”
It was wrong, he said.
In his resignation announcement, Gonzales tried to evoke sympathy by mentioning the difficult life of his father, an alcoholic farmworker in Texas, as if he had the corner on hardship.
He showed no such respect for Iglesias, the son of Baptist missionaries.
Or for Salazar, who grew up dirt-poor on a ranch in the San Luis Valley.
He made them look like suckers for supporting him.
The Gonzales debacle leaves Salazar with plenty of scars from hard lessons learned.
He’s no rookie anymore.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
