Alberto Gonzales is One Classy Motherfucker

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Welcome to the SuicideGirls Newswire, where our motto is All the Alberto that’s Fit to Print™. Today's Alberto Gonzales story is another fun one. We all know that when he’s not excusing torture and hiring unqualified crooks as assistants, Mr. Gonzales likes to work to ensure that the Constitution does not apply to the Executive Branch. Hey, everyone’s got to have a hobby.

But rest assured, dear readers, this habit of working to circumvent due process did not begin when he assumed the role of Attorney General in February of 2005. In fact, today we found out that it’s been something he was big into way back in the day. Heck, when he was just White House counsel, Alberto had to push then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to make sure his president got a chance to listen to your phone calls whenever he wanted. And push him he did. By any means necessary, in fact.
Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he refused to recertify the [warrantless wiretapping] program because Attorney General John Ashcroft had reservations about its legality just before falling ill with pancreatitis in March 2004.

The White House, Comey said, recertified the program without the Justice Department's signoff, allowing it to operate for about three weeks without concurrence on whether it was legal. Comey, Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials at one point considered resigning, Comey said.

"I couldn't stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis," Comey told the panel.
When you’re out-douching John Ashcroft, you know you're reaching truly historic levels of douche-ousity.

Naturally, the story gets even more appalling. Prior to Ashcroft’s hospitalization, he had refused to sign off on Bush’s domestic wiretapping plan. I don’t know for sure, but one can only guess that his refusal had something to do with the fact that White House’s program was blatantly fucking illegal. Just a guess. Of course, that didn’t stop Gonzales, who stooped even lower than I thought possible. Alberto showed up on Ashcroft's sick bed to strong-arm him into giving the go ahead.
The dramatic hospital confrontation involved Comey, the acting attorney general during Ashcroft's absence, and a White House team that included Bush's then-counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, Comey said. Gonzales later succeeded Ashcroft as attorney general.

Senior government officials had expressed concerns about whether the National Security Agency, which administered the warrantless eavesdropping program, had the proper oversight in place. Other concerns included whether any president possessed the legal and constitutional authority to authorize the program as it operated at the time.

Comey testified Tuesday that when he refused to certify the program, Gonzales and Card headed to Ashcroft's sick bed in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital.

When Gonzales appealed to Ashcroft, the ailing attorney general lifted his head off the pillow and in straightforward terms described his views of the program, Comey said. Then he pointed out that Comey, not Ashcroft, held the powers of the attorney general at that moment.

Gonzales and Card then left the hospital room, Comey said.
Nothing classier than hounding a sick man for permission to wipe your ass with the Fourth Amendment. A few months after Gonzales got the certification he needed from the Justice Department to continue the illegal spying program, Comey and Ashcroft resigned, leaving the AG position open for Gonzales.

This bears repeating: John Ashcroft, the same bigoted, insane, fearmongering singer/songwriter who was perfectly willing to brush aside habeas corpus protections for the terrorists at Gitmo, resigned in part because the White House and Alberto Gonzales were even more dismissive of the Constitution than he was. Incredible.

Comey’s testimony comes on the same day that Gonzales officially threw his former right-hand-man under the bus in an attempt to douse the waning flames of the attorney firing scandal. On Monday, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty fell on his sword. On Tuesday, Gonzales gleefully buried his fall guy.
Resigned Justice Department deputy Paul McNulty occupied "a very central place" at the agency, according to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. At the National Press Club, Gonzales said it was McNulty's suggestions on which U.S. attorneys to dismiss that mattered most to him.
[…]
"The one person that I would care about would be the views of the deputy attorney general, because the deputy attorney general is the direct supervisor of the United States attorneys," Gonzales said.

"And in this particular case, Mr. McNulty was a former colleague of all of these United States attorneys, and so he would probably know better than anyone else about the performance and the qualifications of these — of our United States attorney community."
Jesus Christ, he's such a dick. Of course, he’s also a fucking liar.
McNulty has acknowledged approving, last October, the list of prosecutors who were ordered to leave. But documents released by the Justice Department show he was not closely involved in picking all the U.S. attorneys who were put on the list — a job mostly driven by two Gonzales staffers with little prosecutorial experience.

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