U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales is slowly twisting in the wind this week, under attack for a witless, poorly executed political stratagem to dump eight US Attorneys and blame it on their "performance."
Now US News reports that the Dept. of Justice is "paralyzed." President Bush needs yet another exit strategy, thanks to more ineptitude from his so-called aides.
The fear that virtually any piece of communication will have to be turned over has paralyzed department officials' ability to communicate effectively and respond in unison to the crisis, as has the fact that senior Justice officials themselves say they still don't know the entire story about what happened that led to the crisis. So they are afraid that anything they put down on paper could be viewed as lies or obfuscation, when in fact, the story is changing daily as new documents are found and as the Office of Legal Counsel conducts its own internal probe into the matter.Posted by Alan at March 20, 2007 07:00 AMThe paralysis will affect the calculations that Gonzales must make this week as to whether he should stay or go. If Gonzales doesn't resign, there's little doubt that he will get few of his initiatives through for the rest of his tenure and that his people will spend months churning out documents at the behest of angry Democrats who will be investigating virtually anything that moves. But this could also give Gonzales an exit strategy, officials say. He could say that while neither he nor his subordinates did anything wrong, he has decided to resign for the greater good of the department and for justice at large.