The 12 Hour Gap

This from The Editor & Publisher Journal: (America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry)

Published: July 24, 2005 11:20 AM ET

NEW YORK Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, responding to a strong charge in a column by Frank Rich in The New York Times’ today, said there was nothing improper about waiting 12 hours to “preserve all materials” after being informed by the Justice Department in 2003 that it was launching an investigation into the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s status as a CIA agent.

(GOI: Oh yeah, right. Whenever detectives are informed of a crime scene they don't wait 12 HOURS to investigate the crime!! Especially after informing one of the key players (Chief of Staff Andrew Card!!) in the investigation that they'll wait till morning before they look into anything!! What a joke).

Gonzales told Bob Schieffer on the CBS show “Face the Nation” that he had been given permission by the Justice Department to hold off overnight if he saw fit, which he did. But he did tell one man that night: Chief of Staff Andrew Card.

(GOI: And who did Card talk to? I'm sure there is absolutely NO chance that he might have talked to Karl Rove or Lewis Libby is there?? No, how dare I even bring up such an allegation, right? Good Lord. Who in the Bush administration isn't involved in this scandal? In addition to Rove and Libby, (and since he's the V.P.'s spokes person--the Vice President himself is in question. As is Bush by way of Rove) now we have Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card!! The list keep growing).

Appearing on the same CBS show immediately following Gonzales, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Dela.) said: "The real question now is, 'Who did the chief of staff [Andrew Card] speak to?'"Schiefer agreed that this "seemed to perhaps open a whole new can of worms." (GOI: Yeah, good question.)

Gonzales told Schieffer that, as the White House counsel, he never launched his own probe into the matter because “in this kind of case you want to wait to see if there is a criminal investigation.” He said he feared his own queries into the Plame leak “would hinder a criminal investigation.”

(GOI: No, no. This is backward here and it's obvious. Gonzales didn't want to launch his own probe into the matter because he knew his own queries would help a criminal investigation. He was obviously trying to stall and give the leakers time to cover up their tracks).

“As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife,” Rich wrote. “That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must ‘preserve all materials’ relevant to the investigation.

"This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. ‘Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence,’ said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago.”

(GOI: Drip, drip, drip and the facts keep coming out).


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