A nice little storm has been brewed up over an incidental consequence of former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey‘s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Comey’s account of what went down in March 2004 — including the astonishing events of the night of March 10 — seems to contradict the testimony Alberto Gonzales gave before the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 6, 2006.

All kinds of people who should really know better have thundered and fulminated over this. And made rather a fool of themselves, in my opinion.

It seems to have started with a ThinkProgress post by Peter Swire. At least that’s who everyone is crediting with what is being billed as a scoop.

Swire quotes the transcript from Gonzales’ February 2006 testimony (emphasis his):

GONZALES: Senator, here is a response that I feel that I can give with respect to recent speculation or stories about disagreements. There has not been any serious disagreement, including — and I think this is accurate — there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into. I will also say –

SCHUMER: But there was some — I am sorry to cut you off, but there was some dissent within the administration, and Jim Comey did express at some point — that is all I asked you — some reservations.

GONZALES: The point I want to make is that, to my knowledge, none of the reservations dealt with the program that we are talking about today.

And then he says:

Gonzales’ answer suggests two possibilities.

1) Comey’s objections apply to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that Gonzales was discussing. If so, then Gonzales quite likely made serious mis-statements under oath. And Gonzales was deeply and personally involved in the meeting at Ashcroft’s hospital bed, so he won’t be able to claim “I forgot.”

2) Perhaps Comey’s objections applied to a different domestic spying program. That has a big advantage for Gonzales — he wasn’t lying under oath. But then we would have senior Justice officials confirming that other “programs” exist for domestic spying, something the Administration has never previously stated.

Swire isn’t the only person who noticed the apparent contradiction. Other people had in fact blogged about Gonzales’ February 2006 statements at the time.

And those are not the only two possibilities. In fact, in the Through-The-Looking-Glass world that we live in these days, Comey’s objection apply to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program but Gonzales did not lie at all.

Anyone who has been paying the least attention to Gonzales since he started to make a mockery of the Attorney General’s office would know better than to get excited about the apparent contradiction. Especially in light of Comey’s testimony on Tuesday, it’s perfectly clear what Gonzales will say about this brouhaha (if he ever needs to actually make a statement, which I suspect he may not).

Here’s what Comey said on Tuesday:

COMEY: We had the president’s direction to do what we believed, what the Justice Department believed was necessary to put this matter on a footing where we could certify to its legality. And so we then set out to do that. And we did that.

Comey’s testimony is that there was a NSA wiretapping program in place before March 2004 that the Justice Department came to feel was illegal. As a result of the hospital-bed events of March 10 2004, the Justice Department was eventually authorized by the President to revise the program, to bring it into compliance with the law. These changes were made, resulting in what the Justice Department regarded as a legal wiretapping program.

You don’t have to be a graduate of the George Bush School of Deliberate Miscommunication to realize what Gonzales plans to shelter behind:

Comey’s and Ashcroft’s objections were to the earlier program, the one they viewed as illegal.

Gonzales’ February 2006 testimony was about the then-existing program, the revised one that Comey and Ashcroft had no objections to.

There can be no doubt whatsoever that Gonzales deliberately misled the Senate Judiciary Committee. But this wasn’t the post-prosecutor-purge fumbling bumbling Buttercheeks we have recently had on display. This was the Buttercheeks of yore, Buttercheeks at the height of his powers, effortless and arrogantly lying his way through hours of testimony without ever once stumbling, picking his way through the minefield of potential perjury with careless insouciance and practiced ease.

Yesterday, the Democrats jumped in to exploit the contradiction that Gonzales has apparently been caught in:

Democrats said his testimony appeared to contradict Gonzales’ account in February 2006, when he told two congressional panels that there had “not been any serious disagreement about the program.”

“In light of Mr. Comey’s testimony yesterday, do you stand by your 2006 Senate and House testimony, or do you wish to revise it?” Democratic Sens. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, Chuck Schumer of New York, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Dick Durbin of Illinois asked Gonzales in a letter Wednesday.

That is exactly the right way to play it—to skewer him in public, to force him to issue denials through spokespeople that will satisfy no one:

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman said Gonzales’ testimony “was and remains accurate.”

“While the attorney general provided this testimony in an unclassified setting, it is important to consider that the fact and nature of such disagreements have been briefed to the intelligence committees,” Boyd said.

That kind of denial will keep this kind of opening paragraph alive in the mainstream media:

The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract a sworn statement in 2006 by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program.

The one thing the Democrats shouldn’t do is try to have him up before the committee again to revisit the subject. It sounds like that may well be the plan:

A reporter asked Chuck Schumer today whether the Senate Judiciary Committee will be inviting the attorney general to testify about what he remembers of the hospital visit. Schumer’s perfectly reasonable response: “Well, that’s something that we’ll have to consider. But given his past testimony — [the] ‘I don’t knows,’ his evasive answers, to put it even charitably — it’s something we’d have to consider, but I’m not sure it would produce anything more.”

(last paragraph updated at 8 am)