WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales denied Tuesday that he and former White House chief of staff Andy Card pressured then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to recertify President Bush's domestic surveillance program during a now-famous 2004 hospital visit.
Gonzales said that he and Card had been urged by congressional leaders of both parties to ensure that the terrorist surveillance program survive a looming deadline for its expiration. To do that, Gonzales said, he needed the permission of Ashcroft, then the attorney general. Ashcroft at the time was in an intensive care unit recovering from gall bladder surgery.
''We went there because we thought it was important for him to know where the congressional leadership was on this,'' Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee in his first public explanation of the meeting....
Gonzales' version conflicts with that of James Comey, Ashcroft's deputy at the time. ...''I was angry,'' Comey testified in May, releasing details of the meeting for the first time. ''I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general.''
Sometimes you've got to admire this guy's balls. Putting this disgusting episode on the Congressional leadership is a master stroke of the black arts.
When do they impeach this guy?
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