"Gonzo Gate" Building Against Bush's Attorney General

May 3 (LPAC)--While the President has declared total confidence in his former counselor, the author of various memos which okayed torture and holding terrorism-suspects without trial, investigations of the Attorney General's political apparat have accelerated, as reported in the May 3 Washington Post .

DOJ announced on Wednesday, that Gonzales aide and his liaison to the White House, Monica Goodling, is the subject of a new DOJ internal investigation by the DOJ's Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), whether Monica Goodling used party-affiliation as a criterion, when hiring entry-level federal prosecutors, which is a violation of federal statutes. Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley speaking on MSNBC "Countdown" on Wednesday evening, explained that the hiring of career people for day-to-day jobs such as these is supposed to be on the basis of talent, and that Goodling's alleged political test violates centuries of tradition. There are political appointees, he said, and for those jobs "it is appropriate to have policymakers that follow your policies. But when it comes to doing the public's business," he continued, "we're supposed to pick the best people, not the people most loyal to President Bush or Karl Rove or anyone else." Turley also urged Congress to delay Goodling's immunized testimony and let investigators build a case against her first, so that with a viable prosecution hanging over her head, she may be forced to trade away her knowledge about the higher-ups in the DOJ.

In other developments, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to the DOJ for e-mails received from Karl Rove about the U.S. Attorney firings - building on the hypothesis that the Rove electoral apparat directed those firings, not Gonzales or the DOJ - and two of the fired U.S. Attorneys made statements that they'd been threatened by the Deputy Attorney General McNulty's chief of staff, Michael J. Elston, who, they say, offered them Gonzales's silence about their having been fired (which was not then public) in exchange for their not going public about their firings.