Conyers Hunts Leaks in the Administration

Just how far would President Bush go to keep his firewall between Congress and the White House intact?

Talking Points Memo has already covered why Bush will likely never get rid of Gonzales, and they make a compelling argument that it has little to do with fidelity on Bush's part — it's not that he won't get rid of Gonzales, it's that he can't. A fired attorney general would have to be replaced by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and the Senate in its current form would never approve of another Alberto Gonzales. But Gonzales is the current wedge holding the door shut on all the investigations congressional Democrats have been trying to enforce since they came into office. He is, effectively, still working in the White House Counsel position that he left for the Attorney General's job, and as such he's protecting the President more than the law. He is invaluable to Bush, and literally irreplaceable.

So desperate is the president to keep his body man between the executive branch and the law, it seems, that House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has serious concerns about the Bush administration leaking "potentially classified information" to the media in order to guard Gonzales from perjury charges. Conyers' concern stems from stories in the Washington Post and New York Times last Sunday citing "current and former officials briefed on the program" as asserting that the intelligence program that James Comey was referring to in his testimony before Congress was actually an expansive data mining operation, and not part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program — which would mean that Gonzales didn't actually perjure himself when he stated that the talks he had at Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital bedside and with other administration officials were not related to the TSP. That leak was especially irksome when set against the administration's refusal to comply with Congressional requests for documents and information.

America has dealt with poor presidents before, and with administrations that did not respect the rule of law. But there are some breaches of the trust we give our elected officials that are so beyond the pale that we can't help but feel a sense of having been betrayed by those we however reluctantly put into power. It probably speaks volumes as to our faith in the current administration that the possibility of this sort of breach seems so remarkably likely.

It would seem that illegally leaking classified information on national security matters to protect the highest law enforcement officer in the land from the laws he himself is supposed to defend and protect falls under the same blanket of betrayal of the core values of a democratic system that repulsed the nation in the days of the Watergate scandal. I can't imagine that's a parallel that anyone would want drawn, but there it is. And that parallel does not bode well for the administration, or for President Bush.