Gonzales’ performance might not matter

EMBATTLED ATTY. GEN. Alberto R. Gonzales is to appear today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the risk of prejudging what Gonzales might say about the role he played in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, we reject the conventional wisdom that the hearing offers him an opportunity to save his job.

The melodramatic notion that this is a “make or break” appearance for Gonzales has been encouraged by the White House. To ensure that he would be ready for his close-up, the administration subjected the attorney general to mock Senate hearings known as “murder boards.” Then his prepared testimony was released days in advance as a publicity-stoking trial balloon.

Today’s hearing could be illuminating about what Gonzales knew and when he forgot it. But it can’t “make or break” the attorney general because his credibility is already broken, and his fate is a question of politics, not law.

Gonzales originally said he “was not involved in any discussions about what was going on” with the firings — but then had to correct himself after new evidence indicated otherwise. Democrats can be expected to press him on other seeming contradictions between his account and that of his former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson. But even they can’t expect him to suddenly declare that he was the mastermind of some plot.

Instead, Gonzales will couple unambiguous denials of any personal wrongdoing with hedged defenses of what was done in his name. For example, he says in his prepared opening statement that “based upon the record as I know it, it is unfair and unfounded for anyone to conclude that any U.S. attorney was removed for an improper reason.” That’s just the sort of careful language one would expect from an attorney general who subcontracted his decision-making to a meddlesome White House at one end of the process and a hatchet-man chief of staff at the other.

Congress should continue to untangle the sequence of events that led to these firings, and Gonzales’ testimony might prove helpful. But nothing will rehabilitate his reputation as the under-qualified attorney general who was AWOL when a harebrained White House scheme to sack all 93 U.S. attorneys morphed into a narrower hit on targets that included two prosecutors whose decisions had embarrassed the Republican Party.