January 26, 2005
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
MSNBC
The White House would like to chalk it up to partisan politics. But the unexpectedly narrow, 10-8 party-line vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm Alberto Gonzales as attorney general was really the product of deep-seated frustration among moderate Democrats over the White House counsel’s refusal to answer key questions about his role in shaping legal policies for combating terrorism.
As the White House’s top lawyer, Gonzales was a prime architect of some of the Bush White House's most controversial legal stands: to deny Geneva Convention protections to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; to define “torture” in extremely narrow terms, and to declare U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants” who could be locked up indefinitely without access to lawyers.
But more than the policies themselves, it was Gonzales’s uninformative responses to senators’ questions that seemed to infuriate the Democrats most, leading to their rock-solid opposition to him on Wednesday. In his confirmation hearing three weeks ago and his later written responses, Gonzales time and again told senators “I do not have a specific recollection” or “I do not recall” when asked about positions he took on these and other issues.
“It’s the most confusing record of any I’ve looked at,” said Sen. Diane Feinstein, the California Democrat, who had once been expected to support Gonzales but on Wednesday voted against him. She described the mild-mannered White House counsel as “really a cipher.”
Gonzales not only failed to remember what stands he personally took on crucial legal matters, such as the arguments laid out in the now notorious August 2002 “torture memo” written by Justice Department lawyers, he said he couldn’t recall the specifics of meetings he had previously acknowledged took place and that he himself participated in.
In his confirmation hearing, for example, Gonzales had conceded, that he and other senior Bush administration lawyers had engaged in discussions about the boundaries of torture policy and even specific torture techniques—such as feigned burials alive—that might be used against captured terrorists.
But when asked for particulars, he lapsed into his standard formulation: “I do not have a specific recollection about each individual method of questioning [captured terror suspects] discussed,” Gonzales said in a written response to a question from Sen. Edward Kennedy seeking any details at all about the meetings. Nor, he said, could he find any notes or memos that he might have taken at such meetings and which might have helped refresh his memory.
Gonzales’s memory lapses—or, in the eyes of his critics, evasions—extended beyond his time as White House counsel. Asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy about his role in helping Texas Gov. George W. Bush escape jury duty in a drunk-driving case in 1996 (and therefore avoid having to answer questions that might have revealed Bush’s own conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol 20 years earlier) Gonzales recalled accompanying Bush to court and that he “observed” the defense lawyer make a motion to strike Bush from the jury.
What Gonzales couldn’t remember was something that, as NEWSWEEK reported this week, the judge in the case, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer all remembered quite well: that before the hearing began, Gonzales himself had sought a meeting in the judge’s chambers where he urged that Bush be excused from the jury on “conflict of interest” grounds because he might one day be asked to pardon the defendant.
(A liberal-advocacy group, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, this week filed a disciplinary complaint against Gonzales with the State Bar of Texas, asking that the group investigate the White House counsel for misrepresenting the jury-duty matter in his written reply to Leahy. The White House insisted that Gonzales’s answer to Leahy was “accurate” and released a follow-up letter Gonzales sent to Leahy on Tuesday, in response to the NEWSWEEK article, in which he noted pointedly that the Vermont senator had only asked him to describe the details of his “court appearance.” As translated by White House aides, whatever did or didn’t happen in the judge’s chambers wasn’t “in court” and therefore wasn’t covered by the scope of Leahy’s question.)
Gonzales’s oblique, lawyerly responses pushed a number of Democrats—like Feinstein, Joe Biden of Delaware, Charles Schumer of New York and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin—to switch sides at the last minute. Four years ago, Feingold had been the only Democrat to support John Ashcroft as attorney general; today he said he couldn’t vote the same way on Gonzales. Schumer today called his decision to oppose Gonzales as “the most difficult vote I’ve had to make since coming to the Senate.” While he said he liked Gonzales and viewed him as a “genuinely good man,” Schumer said the White House counsel seemed too compromised to place in charge of the Justice Department. “It’s hard to be a straight shooter when you’re a blind loyalist,” Schumer said.
Still, senators said today there was little doubt that Gonzales will be confirmed by the full Senate—although by a far narrower margin than was anticipated when President Bush first nominated him for the job two months ago. And Republicans argue privately that the politics of the Gonzales nomination is still solidly on their side. Not only will the president’s longtime consigliere become the first Hispanic attorney general, the issue the Democrats and human-rights groups are bashing him hardest over—the mistreatment and even alleged torture of suspected terrorists—has shown no traction with the voters. “So they’re going to oppose the first Hispanic attorney general because he’s too mean to terrorists?” cracked one Senate GOP aide about the Gonzales vote.
But today’s vote was deeply disappointing to White House aides and their Republican allies in the Senate. They desperately wanted Gonzales to have a relatively smooth confirmation process that would result in a strong bipartisan vote in the Senate. (Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter had hoped Gonzales would get as many as 75 votes in his favor.) Were that to happen, the aides said privately, it would help to dispel the polarizing atmosphere that has pervaded the Justice Department ever since the divisive John Ashcroft took over.
Today, Specter did not disguise his disappointment. “There is a very, very thick aura of politics in the Washington atmosphere—heavier than usual,” he told reporters after today’s vote. Whatever the cause, it is an aura that is likely to linger—over Capitol Hill and the Justice Department—for some time to come.
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