Gonzales' memory

Either he's lying or he has the worst memory of attorneys-general in US history.

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.

''Clearly if he had been competent and understood the facts and had been inclined to do so, yes we would have asked him,'' Gonzales added.

Which kind of flies in the face of the testimony of James B. Comey, then Ashcroft's deputy attorney general and, because of Ashcroft's medical condition, the person with the authority to extend the eavesdropping program.

In vivid testimony to th Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's presence in the room, turned and left.

The sickbed visit was the start of a dramatic showdown between the White House and the Justice Department in early 2004 that, according to Comey, was resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card. But that was not before Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller and their aides prepared a mass resignation, Comey said. The domestic spying by the National Security Agency continued for several weeks without Justice approval, he said.

"I was angry," Comey testified. "I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."

Perhaps it's time Gonzales exercised his mind a little. Some basic techniques might help him remember a little more. Not that he needs to, I suppose. Given the fact that the rule of law appears to have gone completely off the rails in the Bush administration, remembering facts is just plain inconvenient.

Personally, I'm waiting for the day when Gonzales leaves politics and writes a "tell-all" book. It should be the perfect Republican tome.

One blank page, handsomely bound with a gilded title: I Can't Recall