It must be acknowledged that not being under oath is a courtesy frequently extended to members of the executive branch. However, Gonzales was being questioned about a program that he had helped keep secret from congress, that on the face of it was unconstitutional, and that explicitly evaded the FISA laws. Furthermore, the program had been briefly suspended during the run-up to, and during Gonzales’ confirmation hearing, when he did have to testify under oath. Presumably so that when he was asked, in a necessarily general way, if the administration would engage in a program that evaded or broke the laws of the United States, in the name of national security, he could say that the question was a hypothetical and he could avoid answering and thus avoid committing perjury. Shortly after he was confirmed, the program was resumed.
Yet Specter insisted that Gonzales, our top law enforcement officer, didn’t have to be under oath.
Now, we get to Prosecutorgate.
A few short months ago, Arlen Specter would still have been chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And like all the Bush scandals of the last six years, it would have languished and disappeared into obfuscation, unsworn testimony, secret testimony without transcripts, and no testimony.
After all, Specter enabled the scandal. He was the one who ‘slipped’ the special clause into the Patriot Act that allowed the administration to avoid the confirmation process for the replacement federal prosecutors. Specter has explained, in that special Republican way, that it was really his chief of staff who did it and that he himself didn’t even know about it.
But now, as Nancy Pelosi so gleefully said, “There’s a new Congress in town.” With subpoena power.
In short order, we’ve already learned that:
· The reasons given for the firings were false.
· Gonzales lied (including under oath).
· The culture of present Justice Department makes no distinction between partisan politics and public policy, indeed they believe they should be one and the same.
· That the people at the justice department were conscious that they were not using the law as intended.
· The administration was pushing the Justice Department to help disenfranchise minority voters (under the doublespeak name ‘voter fraud). Disenfranchising minority voters got Bush close enough in 2000 for the Supreme Court to toss him the election, it won him Ohio in 2004. Making sure black people (likely Democratic voters) don’t vote is among the Republican Party’s most vital programs. The opposite, getting more people to vote, from any walk of life, is presumably in the national interest.
· There is a pattern that the fired prosecutors were investigating important Republican office holders.
· The next person along the food chain wants to take the Fifth rather than testify.
· Two of Bush’s closest advisors, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers were involved.
· Additionally, out of another investigation, we have learned that when members of the administration wanted to do something that they knew was illegal or unethical, they used other computers for their emails
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