Daily Kos: Gonzales gave Bushies heads up on Plame investigation

Gonzales gave Bushies heads up on Plame investigation
by kos
Mon Jul 25th, 2005 at 07:47:35 CDT

The weekend's big reminder:

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�-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.

This isn't anything new, but I think all of us had forgotten about it. Now it's easier to see why Gonzales was passed up by Bush when choosing the next Supreme Court justice.

Update: Commenters remind me that while the 12-hour gap is old news, Gonzales' admission that he told Andy Card almost immediately is not. It was a headsup to the administration to what, fire up the shredders?

Daily Kos: Gonzales gave Bushies heads up on Plame investigation