Gonzales Likely to Disappoint

"'The attorney general has offered another in a series of contradictory statements about the mass firing of U.S. attorneys,' Leahy said. 'It has been impossible to discern the truth in this matter based on the shifting explanations and changing stories coming out of the Justice Department and White House.'"

But as I first suggested in my March 14 column, it's quite possible that Gonzales is largely a diversion distracting the public from elements of the prosecutor-purge scandal that lead to the White House. And as I wrote in my March 26 column, it's no secret in Washington that Gonzales is not an autonomous agent. His entire career has been as an enabler of George Bush.

Richard B. Schmitt, writing in the Los Angeles Times, now takes this one step further, laying out a scenario in which Gonzales is so detached and incurious that it's unlikely he has anything of value to offer investigators.

"In public statements about the mess, Gonzales has said that he was only vaguely aware of the planned terminations, which have caused a political firestorm, and that the real work of identifying those who were to be fired was done by his chief of staff.

"But he also has acknowledged attending a number of meetings about the issue, raising the question about how he could not know more about what was happening," Schmitt writes.

"The distance from details, and disclaiming of responsibility, is not unusual for Gonzales based on a review of his public comments about issues inside the Justice Department," Schmitt concludes.

In fact, he adds: "Gonzales has also left observers periodically confounded by comments he has made about other issues in which he apparently rejected bedrock principles of American law, leaving people to wonder whether he had ever deeply thought about the issues."

Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor write for McClatchy Newspapers: "For Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, his testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee is all about him, and whether he can restore enough credibility to keep his job.

"But many of the Democrats who control Congress and the committee have already written off Gonzales. They're less interested in his fate than in whether his testimony can open a back door into the White House as they investigate the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

"Their keenest interest is in how much influence President Bush's political adviser Karl Rove exercised in the firings, and why. . . .

"On Thursday, [Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.] sent Gonzales a list of 10 questions he plans to ask. Half focused on Rove, communications with the White House and allegations of voter fraud - a topic, frequently raised by Republican activists, that Rove and his deputies have acknowledged that they referred to the Justice Department. Democrats view Republican attempts to combat 'voter fraud' as efforts to suppress the turnout of people who are likely to vote Democratic, such as the poor and minorities. . . .

"Disclosure last week that the Republican National Committee can't find records of e-mails that Rove sent on his RNC e-mail account before 2005 fueled the intrigue. Democrats suspect that Rove and other White House officials discussed the U.S. attorneys on their non-White House e-mail accounts."