Is Fredo's Resignation Enough?

By Scott Horton

Given the agonizingly slow fall of Alberto Gonzales (our friends over at Slate have moved him to 95% departure likelihood on the Gonzo-meter), it is likely to take another couple of weeks before he recognizes the obvious and submits his resignation (meeting my now long-standing prognosis: Gonzales out in the first week of May—though I have to say his testimony was so spectacularly bad yesterday that I was tempted to move that up). And when that happens, brace yourself for a strong push. “You've had your pound of flesh,” the loyal Bushies will say, “now let's be done with the matter.” Wrong.

This was never about Alberto Gonzales. His role has been a simple one from the start: enabler. He was the loyal Bush consigliere who could be counted upon to provide a legalistic blessing for any scheme, no matter how putrid: torture, renditions, kangaroo courts, Orwellian surveillance, and now a political manipulation of the machinery of the criminal justice administration. Remember, only weeks ago, Gonzales was the man who stood at Cheney's side arguing against shutting down Guantánamo. It's hard to say which of these offenses is the most shocking or the worse. But even keeping the focus just on the last—the immediate cause of the Senate hearingst—then it's clear that the trail leads to the White House, and specifically to Karl Rove. There is one thing that Alberto Gonzales said that I believe, and it's the claim that he was on the periphery of the process. That's no defense, since he was (well, still is) the Attorney General. But it shores up one critical point: the inquiry can't end with his demission. Even within the Department of Justice, others played a more focal role: Paul J. McNulty, William Moschella, and William W. Mercer, the absentee U.S. Attorney from Montana, for instance, as well as the young political hacks led by Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling.

Moreover, the Department of Justice and White House are raising hackles through their evasion of subpoenas and information requests. Congress should continue with its hearings, but in the end, Congress does not have prosecutorial power. A special prosecutor should be appointed to conduct follow-up investigations, seek indictments, and bring prosecutions where this is appropriate. The prosecutor should be a career law enforcement figure who stands distinctly above politics, and it must be someone distant from the Bush-Rove machine. Anything short of that is not likely to be trusted.

A crossroads has been reached with the pending issue of granting immunity to Bush's Monica. It is important that a special prosecutor enter the picture to avoid the prospect of Congressional inquiry muddying the water for future prosecutions, which now seem almost certain to follow in the wake of the U.S. attorneys scandal. As Joe Conason writes in Salon:

It is obvious that the Bush administration has pursued a strategy of deception and stonewalling. Already one former Justice Department employee, Melissa Goodling, has taken the Fifth Amendment in order to avoid testifying about her role, while the White House insists that none of the actual authors of the firings and cover-up, notably deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, will testify. Millions of e-mails were erased or never logged, in clear violation of the law.

By Friday, the House Judiciary Committee may have voted to grant Goodling immunity in order to obtain her testimony. But members of Congress ought to think carefully before they start immunizing potential witnesses like Goodling, and they should think carefully as well about how they intend to deal with this administration's lawlessness and defiance of its oversight responsibilities.

The answer to Nixonian misconduct is no different now than it was during Watergate. Force the appointment of a special prosecutor and then put all of these public servants under oath in front of a grand jury.