Alberto Gonzales has a couple more days to practice his testimony for the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. He's going to need the extra time. As John wrote in a post earlier, ABC News reported tonight that Gonzales' own e-mails contradict the written testimony he provided to the Senate. Now, there's word that the former Chief of Staff to Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, said under oath this weekend that Gonzales hasn't been honest about his role in the firings of the U.S. Attorneys:
The former top aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has told Congressional investigators that Mr. Gonzales was “inaccurate,” or “at least not complete” in asserting that he had no role in the deliberations about individual United States attorneys who were later dismissed, a Democratic senator said Monday.So that means there are already two sources contradicting Gonzales' written testimony -- and he hasn't even testified yet. You'd think that before the Department of Justice publicly released the testimony that someone might have vetted it for truth and accuracy. But, these people have been lying for so long, they don't even know what the truth is.
The statements by D. Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Mr. Gonzales, during an interview with investigators on Sunday, were made public as the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a hearing that had been scheduled for Tuesday in which Mr. Gonzales was to appear to defend his actions in the dismissals.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is the committee’s chairman, and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, its senior Republican, delayed the hearing until Thursday because of the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech.
In his interview, Mr. Sampson said under oath that Mr. Gonzales took part in discussions last fall about David C. Iglesias, who was removed as the United States attorney in New Mexico, as well as in a June 2006 meeting that addressed concerns about Carol C. Lam, the United States attorney ousted from her job in San Diego, said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. Mr. Sampson made similar statements in public testimony to the Judiciary Committee on March 29, but appeared to offer more specifics in the interview.
Mr. Schumer, who has led the Senate inquiry into the Justice Department’s ouster of eight federal prosecutors, said that Mr. Sampson’s testimony raised new questions about the accuracy of Mr. Gonzales’s previous statements, most recently in testimony released Sunday in advance of the Senate hearing, that he had not taken part in deliberations about individual prosecutors designated for removal.
It's going to be a disturbing spectacle on Thursday. We'll be watching the nation's top law enforcement officer testify when his testimony is already shown to be inaccurate at best. I'm still waiting for the first reporter to actually report that Gonzales is lying.
With these new developments, will Gonzales really show up on Capitol Hill this week? Probably. Like his boss, George Bush, Gonzales is clearly shameless.
