Gonzales Exit Spurs GOP Relief, Dems' Hope

President Says Embattled Attorney General's Name Was "Dragged Through The Mud"

(CBS/AP)  Gonzales was one of the longest-serving members of a group of Texans who came to Washington with Bush more than six years ago at the dawn of a new administration.

Karl Rove, the president's chief political strategist, announced his resignation last week. Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel who was forced to withdraw her nomination for the Supreme Court, left earlier in the year.

Gonzales, too, was once considered for the high court, but conservatives never warmed to the idea and he was passed over.

His appointment as attorney general more than three years ago marked the latest in a series of increasingly high-profile positions that Bush entrusted him with.

A Harvard-educated lawyer, Gonzales signed on with Bush in the mid 1990s. He served as general counsel and secretary of state when his patron was governor of Texas, then won an appointment to the state Supreme Court.

Gonzales was White House counsel during the president's first term, then replaced Ashcroft as attorney general soon after the beginning of the second.

Both jobs gave him key responsibilities in the administration's global war on terror that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a legal memo in 2002, he contended that Bush had the right to waive anti-torture laws and international treaties that protected prisoners of war. The memo said some of the prisoner-of-war protections contained in the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and that in any event, the treaty did not apply to enemy combatants in the war on terror.

Human rights groups later contended his memo led directly to the abuses exposed in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.

Of greater political concern was the Democratic majority that took office in Congress earlier this year. Leahy soon began investigating the firing of federal prosecutors.

Testifying on April 19 before the Judiciary Committee, Gonzales answered "I don't know" and "I can't recall" scores of times when asked about events surrounding the firings.

His support among Republicans in Congress, already weak, eroded markedly, then suffered further with word of the bedside meeting in the intensive care unit of George Washington University Hospital three years earlier.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified that Ashcroft had refused to reauthorize the wiretapping program. Appearing before the Judiciary Committee, he described a confrontation in which Gonzales - White House counsel at the time - and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card had appealed to Ashcroft to overrule his deputy. The ill Ashcroft refused, saying he had transferred power to Comey.

Comey described the events as "an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general."

Gonzales subsequently denied that the dispute was about the terrorist surveillance program, but his credibility was undercut when FBI Director Robert S. Mueller contradicted him.

Several Democrats called for a perjury investigation, but no further action has been taken.