Another Lie from AG Gonzales

Via Muckraker, I found this from the McClatchy Papers:

Internal Bush administration e-mails suggest that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may have played a bigger role than he has acknowledged in the plan to fire several U.S. attorneys.

The e-mails, delivered to Congress Friday night, show that Gonzales attended an hourlong meeting on the firings on Nov. 27, 2006 - 10 days before seven U.S. attorneys were told to resign. The attorney general's participation in the session calls into question his assertion that he was essentially in the dark about the firings.

While it's a nice way of putting it, "calls into question" really is just a euphemism for "is more evidence to the AG's lack of credibility."

But I want everyone to notice when the e-mails were delivered: Friday night. The administration has to know how bad things look - they delivered the bad news on a Friday night, when no one is watching.

Here's the funny. The DoJ's spin on how why what's so obvious isn't what it seems:

A Justice Department spokesman said the latest disclosures don't contradict Gonzales' statements that he knew little about the firings.

"This meeting concerned the roll-out of the U.S. attorney plan. The information available to us does not indicate that there was discussion at this meeting about which U.S. attorneys should or should not be on the list," spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.

And if it DID include the specific attorneys, I'm sure they would have said that since the discussion didn't include the date (or some other detail significant or otherwise) AG Gonzales didn't contradict his sworn testimony to Congress.

Muckraker has more:

McClatchy hits all the high points, the main one being, of course, that Alberto Gonzales sat in on a meeting about the firings on November 27 to review the firing plan. The firings occurred ten days later. During his "I take full responsibilty but I didn't know anything about it" press conference earlier this month, Gonzales said "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on."

Cartainly calls into question his credibility.

It also highlights the lie of the DoJ's spin. Gonzales said he was not involved in any discussion, yet the DoJ says that since the meeting wasn't about specific US Attorneys, his being involved in a discussion isn't in fact the contradiction it appears to be.

As Groucho once said, "Who you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?"