The challenge to United States President Bush’s authority from a newly empowered Congress deepened on Sunday after leading senators — Republicans as well as Democrats — openly questioned the credibility of his Attorney General.
”We have to have an Attorney General who is candid and truthful. And if we find out he’s not been candid and truthful, that’s a very compelling reason for him not to stay on,” Arlen Specter, the most senior Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, told NBC television.
The widening revolt makes the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, a growing liability for Bush, who is struggling to hold the line on his policies from Iraq to climate change after the end of six years of one-party rule.
Gonzales’s position grew even more precarious at the weekend when it emerged that he had, despite earlier denials, been involved in a controversial decision to sack eight federal prosecutors. About 280 pages of documents released by the administration suggest Gonzales had attended a meeting to discuss sacking the prosecutors, 10 days before they were dismissed. The Attorney General had said he saw no memos and attended no meetings on the matter.
Although Bush used his weekly radio address on Saturday to restate his confidence in Gonzales, that disclosure makes such loyalty extremely costly.
”He has got a problem. You cannot have the nation’s chief law enforcement officer with a cloud hanging over his credibility,” Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska, told ABC television.
Hagel, who has been a frequent critic of the administration, warned that Bush’s support for Gonzales could impair his ability to lead on other issues.
The sackings have been condemned as an attempt to politicise the judiciary, and is under investigation by a Democratic-controlled Congress.
Gonzales is to testify before the Senate next month, but tensions are expected to remain high with the appearance before the judiciary committee of a former aide to the Attorney General.
Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat on the committee, on Sunday called on Gonzales to stand down because she does not believe he told the truth about the dismissals of the prosecutors.
Bush has resisted pressure for senior White House aides to testify on the sackings before Congress, proposing instead that Karl Rove and the former White House counsel Harriet Meiers speak privately and off the record to a select group of senators. He has also denounced calls for Gonzales’s resignation, and for a congressional investigation, as partisan attacks on his administration.
Such an explanation does not wash even with Republican senators. ”The Attorney General has been wounded because of his performance and not because of politics,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CBS television. ”He has said some things that just don’t add up.” – Guardian Unlimited Â