Gonzales' Contempt of Congress

Following up on my previous post, all four of the Democratic members of the Gang of Eight--the folks who were briefed on the NSA warrantless surveillance program--have now publicly challenged key parts of Alberto Gonzales' testimony before the Senate yesterday. Both Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman, who were the ranking members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, have stated emphatically that they were only ever briefed on one program, the one the White House now refers to as the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

This confirms my suspicion that Gonzales is not referring to multiple programs, but is just being hyper-legalistic and misleading. When he refers to the "Terrorist Surveillance Program," he's referring to its current incarnation, not the pre-2004 version of the program that James Comey refused to sign off on.

But why would Gonzales resort to this too-cute-by-half kind of obfuscation? He had to know that people who had been briefed on the program and were present at the meeting he referenced (i.e., Harman, Rockefeller, Pelosi, Daschle) would point out how misleading his testimony was.

Well, the answer to that is pretty simple. Gonzales was backed into this corner by his own prior attempts to mislead Congress. Back on February 6, 2006, the following exchange took place between Senator Schumer and Gonzales (thanks, JaO):

GONZALES: There has not been any serious disagreement -- and I think this is accurate -- there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations which I cannot get into. ...I will also say

SCHUMER: But there was some -- I'm sorry to cut you off -- but there was some dissent within the administration. And Jim Comey did express, at some point -- that's all I asked you -- some reservations.

GONZALES: The point I want to make is that, to my knowledge, none of the reservations dealt with the program that we're talking about today. They dealt with operational capabilities that we're not talking about today.

I think that Gonzales was again relying a technical distinction between the program as it is currently constituted and the program as it existed pre-2004. And I think the reason he chose to make this distinction was because he wanted to waive Congress off the trail of James Comey. At the time, the Republicans still controlled Congress and Gonzales was probably hoping that if he played his cards right, Comey would never be called upon to testify about the whole Ashcroft hospital incident.

But it didn't work. The Democrats took over Congress and Comey's story was eventually told. Now Gonzales is trapped by his own prior testimony. He testified that there was no "serious disagreement" about the warrantless surveillance program and that any internal dissent involved different activities. It's too late to back down on that. The record has gone uncorrected for too long. If he concedes now that the Comey incident involved "the program that the president has confirmed," he'll be admitting to having blatantly misled Congress in February 2006. So instead, he is forced to imply that the Ashcroft hospital incident involved some other program.

Oh what a tangled web we weave . . .