Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

The Gonzales-Card Leak (was: Rove-Plame Leak)

Steven G. Brant
Sun Jul 24, 5:29 PM ET

What did White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card learn from Alberto Gonzales and when did he learn it...and what did he do with that knowledge? This "whole new can of worms" (to quote CBS News' Bob Schieffer, on this morning's Face The Nation) is to me the breaking news question of the day. Why? Because on today's Face The Nation, Alberto Gonzales admitted that he called Andrew Card right after he was notified that the Justice Department had opened its investigation of the Plame leak...even though he formally notified The White House staff 12 hours later.

On Face The Nation, Gonzales said the Justice Department contacted him at 8pm and, after responding by saying something to the effect that everyone had gone home for the night, Gonzales asked if it would be okay if he waited until 8am the next day to notify The White House Staff to "preserve all records" etc. Gonzales got permission to do so, but then - again this is Gonzales speaking on Face The Nation - he said he contacted Andrew Card to informally tell him what had happened.

I wish you could have seen Bob Schieffer's face as he came back from commercial break to his next guest, Senator Joe Biden, who he then took up this issue with. Bob Schieffer said to Joe Biden (I'm paraphrasing here...I'll post the transcript when it's available) "You know, everyone in The White House has these BlackBerrys. And you have to wonder what sort of message Andrew Card emailed at 8pm to the other people in The White House...what sort of documents could have been shredded in those 12 hours." There was little Joe Biden needed to add to what Bob Schieffer said. But Watergate - and the famous 18 1/2 minute gap on the audio recording (remember Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods posing for a picture in which she tried to demonstrate how she could have accidentally erased those 18 1/2 minutes from the tape?) - suddenly became the "pink elephant" in the room. You could see it on Schieffer and Biden's faces.

I don't think there's anything more I need to add eiither...

...except that to me this is one HOT NEWS ITEM!

The background to Bob Schieffer's questioning of Alberto Gonzales is Frank Rich's piece in today's NY TImes. In "Eight Days in July [ http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/opinion/24rich.html (F6 note -- my next post, a reply to this post)]", where we learn that, with the permission of the Attorney General's Office, then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales waited 12 HOURS to alert the staff at the White House that an investigation was starting and that all documents should be preserved.

I recommend you read the whole article, but here's the relevant paragraph:

"As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18 1/2-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months."

Well, my friends, Truth Marches On!

With this one little sidebar comment. This morning, after he appeared on Face The Nation, Alberto Gonzales also appeared on Wolf Blitzer's Late Edition. Assuming these shows are both broadcast live, I would have expected that Wolf Blitzer's staff would have watched Gonzales's appearance on Face The Nation (or, at least, would have read Frank Rich's piece in today's NY Times..which would at least have alerted them to the existence of this topic) and that Wolf Blitzer would have brought up the same "12 Hours" subject that Bob Schieffer did. Well, he didn't. He asked Gonzales several Plame-related questions, but he never mentioned the "12 Hour Gap". To me, that's pretty sloppy reporting. Please, Wolf, we need you to investigate this part of the story!

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