Gonzales threatens resignation over Congressional office raid

This item has been updated with additional material here.

For the second time in recent months, Justice Department officials took a strong stand against compromising evidence in an investigation. This time, the action involved keeping the evidence available to investigators rather than denying them access to it.

The New York Times says attorney general Alberto Gonxales and a top aide threatened to resign if president Bush sided with House of Representatives leaders in a dispute over an FBI raid on the offices of Democratic Congressman William J. Jefferson, who is the target of an FBI corruption inquiry and had refused to comply with a subpoena for documents sought by the FBI.

Earlier this year, Gonzales took a similarly strong stand against allowing the Justice Department’s own Office of Professional Responsibility access to documents connected with Gonzales’ authorization of the National Security Agency’s domestic warrantless wiretapping program. In that instance Gonzales, citing national security concerns, refused to grant security clearances to investigators looking into allegations that he and other department officials may have acted improperly in approving the program.

That action effectively preserved any evidence of official wrong doing, albeit it in that instance preserving it from exposure rather than from destruction.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert squealed like a stuck pig protested vehemently after the FBI incursion into his castle House territory. Hastert was joined by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, whose responsibilities apparently include providing bipartisan support for the notion that Congressional office holders are free to comply with the law or not, as they choose. Republicans under investigation for corruption will no doubt be heartened by Pelosi’s endorsement of the principle.

President Bush, Solomon-like, brokered a compromise between Hastert and Gonzales in which materials seized from Jefferson’s office have been sealed for 45 days. This creates a cooling-down period during which Hastert, who is reportedly also under investigation by the FBI, and Gonzales can negotiate a compromise on future raids that will preserve Republicans from sharing Jefferson’s fate while at the same time memorializing Pelosi’s against-all-odds feat of relinquishing the moral high ground on Congressional corruption.

Hastert certainly has reason to be wary of an executive branch who assert a doctrine of unlimited power and have repeatedly rebuffed Congree’s feeble attempts at oversight, and there’s ample reason for Democrats to worry that the White House might suborn the FBI to their own purposes: it’s happened before.

But until this point Hastert has shown no willingness whatsoever to challenge the White House on separation of powers issues, and neither House nor Senate Democrats, although individually more vocal, have taken concerted action to protest Bush’s accumulation of power — and for Democrats, Jefferson’s corruption problem is not exactly the ideal vehicle through which to pursue such an action.

What’s likely to result from the contretemps is that Hastert will receive some assurances regarding future potential FBI actions in Congress, Republicans will resume their bovine complacence toward executive branch steamrolling of the legislature, Pelosi’s somewhat reluctant support for Jefferson will become Exhibit 1 in the case that Democrats are hypocrites on the corruption issue, and no one will have any assurance that the FBI isn’t being or won’t be used to advance partisan or parochial executive branch agendas.

Hastert doesn’t care about separation of powers unless the issue gets between him and the House cafeteria. If Pelosi really wants to effect some changes in executive branch behavior, she should consider following the extremely unlikely and no doubt conditional example of Alberto Gonzales and persuade her colleagues to join her in some meaningful expression of legislative dissent.

UPDATE: Congressional leaders have acknowledged that the raid on Jefferson’s office was Consitutional and are working on a deal with Gonzales regarding procedures for future raids. Bill Frist says “I want to know exactly what would happen if there is a similar sort of thing” in his neck of the woods.