GOP Senator: Resign, let's put this behind us
 In the afternoon session of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Alberto Gonzales, a Republican Senator called on the Attorney General to resign.
"It was handled incompetently, the communication was atrocious. It was inconsistent. It’s generous to say that there was misstatements, that’s a generous statement," said Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). "And I believe you ought to suffer the consequences that these others have suffered, and I believe the best way to put this behind us is your resignation."
You don't know the damage this has caused
Subsequently, a freshman senator accused Gonzales of not understanding what the firing of the US Attorneys had done to America's system of justice.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) addressed the question of how independent US Attorneys need to be in order to perform effectively as prosecutors.
"You're not aware of the damage...this episode has caused," Whitehouse argued.
Gonzales offered a response, clinging to the power of the President to set his own policies.
"The independence of US Attorneys is important," he said. "However, I have to qualify that a bit. With respect to policies and priorities, the President is elected based on his policies."
Senator Whitehouse fired back.
"There's a counterbalance to it...If you say to Carol Lam, you're not doing enough immigration prosecutions, therefore you're fired, that has all kinds of collateral consequences...some of which are quite evil," he said.
Whitehouse added that Lam was "regarded highly among her colleagues," and that firing her "sends a message about public corruption prosecutions. You can't let the policies run away with the issue."
"I don't know what happened"
The afternoon session of the hearing began with the Attorney General admitting there was still much that he did not understand about the how the 8 US Attorneys were fired.
"There are clearly things I don't know that happened, and that's frustrating to me as head of the Department," Gonzales admitted in response to a question from Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA).
He again pointed to the Office of Professional Responsibility and Office of Inspector General investigations of the Justice Department's actions, and explained there were things he could not understand as a consequence.
"I haven't discussed these things with the witnesses, and I don't want to interfere with the Department's investigations," he argued.
Grassley had asked Gonzales "Why are there so many inconsistencies, is it something about the environment you work in?"
In spite of this lack of knowledge, Gonzales subsequently told Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), that his Deputy Attorney General would never fire US Attorneys for political reasons.
"I don't believe that he would make an improper recommendation about why a US Attorney should be removed," he said.
After Senator Whitehouse spoke, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) shifted the focus, bringing up a set of issues about ongoing Justice Department policies without going into very much detail about the US Attorneys matter. But the junior senator from Arizona did assail his colleague Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Kyl dismissed Senator Schumer's claim that the circumstantial evidence against the Gonzales Justice Department was building up by calling it a "new conspiracy theory standard." He accused Schumer of forcing the Justice Department to "prove a negative," and called it "unprecedented."
Bush never told me to fire any Attorneys
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VA) began the second round of questioning by asking about the e-mails on Republican National Committee servers that were written by White House staff.
Gonzales said that the e-mails would still be counted as official government business because they were written by government employees, appearing to expand the White House's claim of privilege over the communications.
However, he did discuss his understanding of White House e-mail policies based on his time as White House Counsel, and seemed to imply that the White House staff e-mails on RNC accounts had not been appropriately archived.
"The intent of the policy as I recall was those e-mail addresses were to be used primarily for non-governmental purposes, but if there was governmental communications communicated over this equipment, there should be some kind of effort to preserve them, they should be printed out, or in some way forwarded to a government computer," he explained.
He also told Leahy that the President had never asked him to fire any individual US Attorney.
DEVELOPING - MORE TESTIMONY TO COME ...
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