The Washington Post today
reports, that Russ Feingold is accusing US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of misleading congress during his nomination hearings.
In a letter to the attorney general yesterday, Feingold demanded to know why Gonzales dismissed the senator's question about warrantless eavesdropping as a "hypothetical situation" during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January 2005. At the hearing, Feingold asked Gonzales where the president's authority ends and whether Gonzales believed the president could, for example, act in contravention of existing criminal laws and spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant.
More below...
Gonzales said that it was impossible to answer such a hypothetical question but that it was "not the policy or the agenda of this president" to authorize actions that conflict with existing law. He added that he would hope to alert Congress if the president ever chose to authorize warrantless surveillance, according to a transcript of the hearing.
Well, ok, we lost the Alito fight. In Virginia James Webb isn't running for the US Senate.
But the next fight is ours and it's the big one.
It's the battle to end the Bush Presidency and it's going to go like this:
In fact, the president did secretly authorize the National Security Agency to begin warrantless monitoring of calls and e-mails between the United States and other nations soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The program, publicly revealed in media reports last month, was unknown to Feingold and his staff at the time Feingold questioned Gonzales, according to a staff member. Feingold's aides developed the 2005 questions based on privacy advocates' concerns about broad interpretations of executive power.
Gonzales was White House counsel at the time the program began and has since acknowledged his role in affirming the president's authority to launch the surveillance effort. Gonzales is scheduled to testify Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the program's legal rationale.
"It now appears that the Attorney General was not being straight with the Judiciary Committee and he has some explaining to do," Feingold said in a statement yesterday.
The Democrats are going to declare war on the lies of the Bush White House. They're going to expose every misleading statement they issued to congress, every oath they broke, every piece of the Constitution they trashed.
What will it amount to? A national call to end the Bush Presidency starting with the 2006 Midterms.
Go Russ!
[UPDATE: I thought these links were interesting:
Think Progress has a great Russ v. Gonzales writeup.
Feingold's address to the US Senate stating his opposition to confirmation, is brilliant. Meanwhile, Brad Delong has been calling for Gonzales' Impeachment on this issue since December.]