Someday I’ll Exact Revenge

Remember yesterday, when I pointed out how great a reporter my friend Murray Waas is? Here’s a good case in point. Murray has a gobsmacking story out in the Atlantic today about how our old friend Alberto Gonzales is under DOJ investigation for potentially fabricating a crucial set of notes justifying the warrantless surveillance program(s) in March 2004 — yes, exactly when Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith stood up to the program — to say that the surveillance carried with the Congressional approval that the Democrats informed about the program have always denied granting. Murray:

The timing of when Bush directed Gonzales to write the notes is important: investigators say the fact that they were written after both the meeting and the reauthorization of the program might indicate that they were written in order to provide an after-the-fact justification for the signing of the reauthorization—and that that timing might have given Gonzales a motive to lie in the notes.

Stanley Brand, a Washington attorney who specializes in representing executive branch officials under investigation, said in an interview: “Why would you want someone to take notes of a meeting days after the fact? If you wanted your notes to stand up, they are going to be more credible if you took them at the meeting itself or shortly after it occurred. Any reputable lawyer would want to write them as soon as possible.”

When the notes were written and when the president directed Gonzales to write them is “extraordinarily relevant and would allow a person to draw a reasonable inference … that something funny was going on.” An investigating body, or a jury, Brand said, might “infer there was a conspiracy afoot to obstruct with or without the participation of the president.”

Please please please let Gonzales face charges. Please.