Is Attorney General Gonzales A Co-Conspirator In Leak?

In an op-ed piece today in The New York Times Frank Rich informs us that "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." Did this give Andrew Card time to maybe get things in order before he officially notified the staff to "preserve all materials" regarding the Plan leak? Gonzales even admitted the delay today on CBS "Face The Nation" with Bob Schieffer. when he told Schieffer that he was contacted by the Justice Department at 8pm and, after telling them everyone had gone home for the night, he apparently 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. and was given permission to do so. That's a 12 hour delay for heaven's sake yet he still "as a courtesy" found the time to notify Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card immediately after the call. Would this not give Card time to cover a few tracks and get others to do so also? Everyday, this entire scandal reveals more and more questions as to who in this administration knew what and when, and every day the answers smell worse and worse. We now have the following people possibly involved. Rove, Libby, Card, Gonzales....the list goes on and on. And yet we are scorned and laughed at when we say this is worse than the Watergate scandal. The NYT article is available HERE. If you wish to read a PDF of the "Face The Nation" transcript, it is available HERE. A WMP video of this portion of FTN is also available at Crooks and Liars.