This story is all over the internets, but I can’t resist linking to it to. Read this great article by Murray Wass from the National Journal. It’s impossible to cherry pick a quote, there’s just too much there, but this gives a flavor of it:
The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove’s, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
The withheld records show that D. Kyle Sampson, who was then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with White House officials in drafting two letters to Congress that appear to have misrepresented the circumstances of Griffin’s appointment as U.S. attorney and of Rove’s role in supporting Griffin.
It’s a complex story, but it boils down to this. At every possible opportunity the White House and the Justice Department have lied about every facet of this scandal. It’s almost as if they can’t help themselves.
More surprising that that is the fact that there may actually be someone within the executive branch who has some integrity:
Several of the e-mails that the Bush administration is withholding from Congress, as well as papers from the White House counsel’s office describing other withheld documents, were made available to National Journal by a senior executive branch official, who said that the administration has inappropriately kept many of them from Congress.
The senior official said that Gonzales, in preparing for testimony before Congress, has personally reviewed the withheld records and has a responsibility to make public any information he has about efforts by his former chief of staff, other department aides, and White House officials to conceal Rove’s role.
“If [Gonzales] didn’t know everything that was going on when it went down, that is one thing,” this official said. “But he knows and understands chapter and verse. If there was an effort within Justice and the White House to mislead Congress, it is his duty to disclose that to Congress. As the country’s chief law enforcement official, he has a higher duty to disclose than to protect himself or the administration.”
But before we jump to the crazy conclusion that someone in the executive branch has scruples, we must pause to consider that this might just be some sort of guerrilla warfare within the executive, or between the White House and Justice. If so, maybe that’s even better. Nothing beats watching your opponents devour each other.
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