Sunday, July 24, 2005

Plame flash-back

Is Buttie avoiding nominating Gonzales for the Supreme Court because of the Plame case?
[Frank Rich in The New York Times] had written that Gonzales was likely denied the Supreme Court nod that just went to John G. Roberts because the White House feared that he had too much “proximity” to the Plame scandal.

“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,” Rich wrote. “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 18½-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.”

  Editor & Publisher article

Or does Buttie just want to keep Gonzales at the DoJ? Or maybe he figured the torture okay Gonzales provided as WH counsel might get in the way of a Supreme nomination? Who knows? But it's a good reminder of that "12-minute gap" in the Plame investigation when the WH could have destroyed evidence.

....and hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

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