CT Blue

I’m spending some time watching Youtubes of Gonzales Senate testimony. What I find frustrating is the fact that the quality of the questioning is so uneven. It would be far more effective if the Democrats picked one or two of the best interrogators and yield their time to them, allowing them to develop their cross examinations more effectively.

Senator Schumer does a great job here:

Toward the end of the video he discusses an email that Kyle Sampson wrote to the White House outlining their strategy to install Rove tool Tim Griffin as U.S. Attorney in Eastern Arkansas. This from the TPM Muckraker article at the link:

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) has publicly accused Gonzales of lying to him in a conversation late last year about the appointment of Tim Griffin to be the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock. Gonzales, Pryor says, promised him that the administration would submit Griffin for Senate confirmation, while privately plotting to string Pryor along for the remainder of Bush’s term, because Gonzales knew Griffin’s chances at confirmation were hopeless. It was a strategy that his chief of staff Kyle Sampson outlined in a lengthy email only a couple of days after Pryor’s conversation with Gonzales: armed with the newly won legal authority to indefinitely appoint U.S. attorneys, the administration didn’t need its nominees approved by the Senate, so they could just “run out the clock.” “I think we should gum this to death,” Sampson wrote, and after rattling off a list of stalling tactics, added: “All of this should be done in ‘good faith,’ of course.”

Gonzales repeatedly insists that he opposed the stealth appointment process in the “Patriot Act” and he opposed the tactics laid out in the memo. One thing Schumer failed to mention, or didn’t have the time to get to, is the fact that the process outlined in Sampson’s email has been implemented and is being followed. Despite Gonzales promise that he would be subject to Senate confirmation his name has never been sent to the Senate, and it is unlikely that it ever will.