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WASHINGTON, D.C. - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ resignation yesterday after months of draining controversy drew expressions of relief from Republicans and a vow from Democrats to pursue their investigation into fired federal prosecutors.
President Bush, Gonzales’ most dogged defender, told reporter he had accepte4d the resignation reluctantly. “His good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons,” Bush said.
The president named Paul Clement, the solicitor general, as a temporary replacement. There was no indication when Bush would name a successor – or how quickly or easily the Senate might confirm one.
Apart from the president, there were few Republican expressions of regret following the departure of the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general.
“Our country needs a credible, effective attorney general who can work with Congress on critical issues,” said Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire, who last March was the first GOP lawmaker to call on Gonzales to step down. “Alberto Gonzales’ resignation will finally allow a new attorney general to take on this task.”
Under Gonzales and Bush, “the Department of Justice suffered a sever crisis of leadership that allowed our justice system to be corrupted by political influence,” sad Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who has presided over the investigation into the firings of eight prosecutors whom Democrats say were axed for political reasons.
Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the investigation would not end with Gonzales’ leaving.
“Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House,” said the Nevada Democrat.
Gonzales also has struggled to explain his involvement in a 2004 meeting at the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had refused to certify the legality of Bush’s no warrant wiretapping program. Ashcroft was in intensive care at the time.
The speculation about a successor began immediately, and included Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff; Asa Hutchinson, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration; former solicitor general Ted Olson; and Larry Thompson, the second-ranking official at the Justice Department in Bush’s first term.
Gonzales made a brief appearance at the Justice Department to announce his resignation. “I have lived the American dream,” said the son of migrants. “Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father’s best days.”
Several officials said Gonzales called Bush at his ranch Friday to offer his resignation. Bush did not attempt to dissuade him but accepted with reluctance, they said.
Gonzales was one of the longest-serving members of a group of Texans who came to Washington with Bush more than six years ago at the dawn of a new administration. A Harvard-educated lawyer, Gonzales signed on with Bush in the mid-1990s. He served as general counsel and secretary of state when his patron was governor of Texas, then won an appointment to eh state Supreme Court.
Gonzales was White House counsel during the president’s first term, then replaced Ashcroft as attorney general soon after the b beginning of the second. Both jobs gave him key responsibilities in the administration’s global war on terror that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In a legal memo in 2002, he contended Bush had the right to waive anti-torture laws and international treaties that protected prisoners of war.
The memo said some of the prisoner-of-war protections contained in the Geneva Conventions were “quaint” and that in any event, the treaty did not apply to enemy combatants in the war on terror.
U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., a member of the House and Judiciary Committee, yesterday said Gonzales’ resignation came as neither surprise nor shock.
“I’m sure there’s a sense of relief reverberating through Congress as well as with the administration because the Department of Justice had become paralyzed,” Delahunt said in a telephone interview.
“This is not just about the level of politicization of the Department of Justice,” he said. “It is about the Department of Justice being impaired in its ability to function and losing credibility with the American public.”
U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued the following statement: “The resignation of the Attorney General is long overdue. … He had played a central role in authorizing the use of torture against detainees and other deprivations of civil liberties. Since his confirmation, he has presided over one disastrous policy after another, including the continued abuse of detainees, the approval of unlawful wiretapping by the NSA, the partisan enforcement of the (V)oting Rights Act and the failure to enforce our other civil rights laws, the abusive use of National Security Letters and the inappropriate firing of the U.S. Attorneys.
In a statement yesterday Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said, “Alberto Gonzales turned the Justice Department into a political arm of the White House and he should have resigned long ago.
“From the firings of the US Attorneys to evasion about illegal wiretapping, Gonzales single-handedly damaged the integrity of our legal system and subverted efforts to get to the truth. This is a critical moment. President Bush can either continue on a divisive and destructive path, or choose in the next Attorney General someone who knows they’re not the president’s lawyer but rather the nation’s top law enforcement officer.”
---Cape Cod Times Staff writer Karen Jeffrey contributed to this report.
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