1115.org

Fleshing out yesterday’s coverage of the Kyle Sampson hearing:

On Gonzales’s “Out of the loop, baby!” defense

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was briefed regularly over two years on the firings of federal prosecutors, his former top aide said Thursday, disputing Gonzales’ claims he was not closely involved with the dismissals.

The testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Kyle Sampson, the attorney general’s former chief of staff, newly undercut Gonzales’ already shaky credibility.

Gonzales and former White House counsel Harriet Miers made the final decision on whether to fire the U.S. attorneys last year, Sampson said.

“I don’t think the attorney general’s statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate,” Sampson told the committee as it inquired into whether the dismissals were politically motivated.

“I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign,” Sampson said.

Sampson’s testimony for the first time put Gonzales at the heart of the firings amid ever-changing Justice Department accounts of how they were planned.

Gonzales has said repeatedly that he was not closely involved in the firings and largely depended on Sampson to orchestrate them. The Justice Department maintains Gonzales was not involved in selecting which prosecutors would be asked to resign.

Sampson resigned March 12. A day later, Gonzales said he “never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood” in the firings.

The White House stepped back from defending Gonzales even before Sampson finished testifying.

“I’m going to have to let the attorney general speak for himself,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said as Sampson entered his third hour before the senators. Noting that Gonzales is not scheduled to appear publicly on Capitol Hill until an April 17 hhearing in front of the same Senate panel, she added: “I agree three weeks is a long time.”

Might we expect that Buttercheeks will now — in the inimitable words of Dana “15 Outfits” Perino — come to “recall having recollections about having deliberative discussions about the ongoing process over that two-year period”?

A hit! A very palpable hit!

Later, Sen. Schumer asked, acidly, whether Miers ever suggested that maybe young, lightly experienced, Sampson wasn’t the best person to be in charge of firing U.S. attorneys after he made the suggestion about canning widely-respected Patrick Fitzgerald? Sampson said no.

Schumer’s Summary

“We’ve learned that Attorney General Gonzales was personally involved in the firing plan after being told that he wasn’t. We’ve learned that the White House was involved after being told that it wasn’t. We have learned that Karl Rove was involved after being told that he wasn’t. And we have learned that political considerations were very important after being told that they weren’t,” groused Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

Question of the Day

He repeatedly called himself “the aggregator of information” in the process and “the keeper of the list,” as if he had some ceremonial function in a ritual that went awry.

“The list”, of course, is the list of those who would be fired. If Sampson was the keeper of the list, who the eff was the maker?