The front page of yesterday’s Washington Post had a story by John Solomon suggesting that Alberto Gonzales may have lied to Congress about the Patriot Act in 2005. Although the story received a lot of play on the Hill and in the blogs yesterday, on closer inspection I think this story is seriously weak if not outright misleading. Here’s the intro of the story:
As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse,” Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.
Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
I have already called for Alberto Gonzales to resign, and I still think he should resign, so I’m not one to go out of my way to defend Gonzales. But these criticisms strike me as really quite weak, and that they rest on some questionable connecting of dots by Post reporter John Solomon.
First, some context. Gonzales’s statement was made in the context of the sunsetting provisions of the Patriot Act. Congress had imposed sunset provisions on parts of the Patriot Act in 2001, and Gonzales was arguing that sunsetted provisions weren’t necessary. Here’s what he said:
Finally, I