alberto gonzales

The Spanish newspaper Público reported Saturday that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against six senior Bush administration lawyers for facilitating the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, according to Andy Worthington.
In March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the legal architects of the Bush detention and interrogation policies, [...]

Yes, that’s the opera based on the transcripts of the former attorney general’s bumbling testimony about the U.S. attorney firing scandal back in 2007.
A 29-year-old Australian, Melissa Dunphy, wrote the opera in part because she felt sorry for Gonzales, as she tells the Wall Street Journal. It’s called The Gonzales Cantata.
“I wrote the piece as [...]

Breaking news from The Washington Post:
The dismissal of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias in December 2006 followed extensive communication among lawyers and political aides in the White House who hashed over complaints about his work on public corruption cases against Democrats, according to newly released e-mails and transcripts of closed-door House testimony by [...]

Letters between Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and the Justice Department shed light on a reportedly impending investigation that would mark the Obama administration’s first clear break from the Bush-era policy of refusing to prosecute abuse cases.

Buried in a profile of the controversial former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo in today’s Washington Post is the casual mention that the Justice Department is no longer representing Yoo to fight a lawsuit filed against him by Jose Padilla. Instead, GOP-connected lawyer and former Bush appellate court nominee Miguel Estrada has stepped into the [...]

One warrantless surveillance mystery solved. My friend Marcy Wheeler beat me to this: George W. Bush personally ordered White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card to visit an ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft in the hospital in March 2004 after Ashcroft’s deputy Jim Comey refused to certify the warrantless surveillance program. [...]

Ah, Alberto Gonzales. After the then-Attorney General presented a slippery account to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2007 of, among other subjects, the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance efforts, a group of Democratic senators quickly moved to investigate Gonzales for perjury. The immediate issue was Gonzales’ assertion that Justice Department employees did not have “reservations” [...]

Apparently, to teach at Texas Tech, it’s not disqualifying to be a disgraced former official with a flagrant disregard for the law. An unemployment rate of 9.5 percent and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales can find a job?

Neil Lewis writes about the oversized role that conservative bitterness is playing in the fight against Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. There’s a lot of focused on bruised feelings from the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, and some focus on the more important precedent: the extended filibuster of Miguel Estrada, a nominee [...]

McClatchy does a good job outlining the “omissions, exaggerations and misstatements” in former Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday. (That’s via Attaturk.) For real granular detail, check out Dan Froomkin’s take at Neiman Watchdog. In particular, Froomkin takes on Cheney’s debunked claim that there can be no parallel drawn between [...]