John Ashcroft, paragon of virtue

There's no question that this post about the testimony by Deputy AG James Comey before the Senate Judiciary Committee today points to a wanton disregard of the DOJ by the administration. As Tristero says, how crooked does this administration have to be to make John Ashcroft pull away in horror?

The program was reauthorized without the signature of the attorney general. Because of that, Comey said, he prepared a letter of resignation. "I believed that I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that Justice Department said had no legal basis."

At this point, according to Comey, a number of senior Justice Department officials, including Ashcroft, were prepared to resign...

What it also shows, of course, is just how important Gonzales is to the administration. They needed to find someone so slavishly obedient, so grossly inept, and as intellectually incurious as the boy king himself to place at the head of Justice. Their disregard for the rule of law and utter contempt of the Constitution required that. When they discovered that an old right wing stalwart like Ashcroft even had limits on how far he would go in rubber stamping the White House's radical grab for power, they reached out to the ultimate toady, Gonzo. The resume item that recommended him was the memo justifying the use of torture. If you can go there, you can go anywhere with regard to human rights and the rule of law. A bit of warrantless wiretapping is penny ante compared to that, eh?

His survival is more important to the administration than we may ever know. And if he doesn't turn, we'll never know the promises that were made to keep him quiet.

Update: From a post at TPM today, it is of course absurd to believe that Ashcroft was the backbone in this affair:

Simply this. The warantless wiretap surveillance program stank. For two and a half years, Ashcroft signed off on the program every forty-five days without any real knowledge of what it entailed. In his defense, the advisors who were supposed to review such things on his behalf were denied access; to his everlasting shame, he did not press hard enough to have that corrected.

When Comey came on board, he insisted on being granted access, and had Goldsmith review the program. What they found was so repugnant to any notion of constitutional liberties that even Ashcroft, once briefed, was willing to resign rather than sign off again.