Okay, at the last minute he was reminded that what he was doing was unconstitutional and added a sentence. But if Murray Waas is to be believed, there’s something really, really fishy here.

Can’t quote a lot out of the National Journal, and this is a moderately long piece. Really quite balanced—all relevant “Clinton did it too!” excuses are noted. But Abu Al basically delegated to Sampson and Goodling—who had maybe one actual prosecution between them as legal experience—authority to take dictation from the White House on hiring and firing decisions of all non-Civil Service Justice Department employees.

And hide it from Congress.

oopsie…Abu Al may have to come back and sit with the dunce Can’t Recall cap on again for awhile longer. Now we know why he can’t remember doing this shit…he delegated the doing to what are described as “a couple of puppies.”

The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed.

[snip]
An original draft of Gonzales’s delegation of authority to Sampson and Goodling was so broad that it did not even require the two aides to obtain the final approval of the attorney general before moving to dismiss other department officials, according to records obtained by National Journal.

The department’s Office of Legal Counsel feared that such an unconditional delegation of authority was unconstitutional, the documents show. As a result, the original delegation was rewritten so that in its final form the order required “any proposed appointments or removals of personnel” be “presented to the Attorney General… for approval, and each appointment or removal shall be made in the name of the Attorney General.”

The senior administration official who had firsthand knowledge of the plan said that Gonzales and other Justice officials had a “clear obligation” to disclose the plan’s existence to the House and Senate Judiciary committees — but the official said that, as far as he knew, they had not done so. When the committees began to inquire into the firings of the U.S. attorneys, the official said, Congress had a right to know that the firings were part of an ambitious effort to install administration loyalists throughout the department.

Go read, especially any of you with lawyerly backgrounds. It sounds like just enough ass-covering was provided that Gonzales is technically okay…but “listen” to the people Waas quotes, half of whom didn’t know this memo existed until he told them about it. You can just about see their hair standing on end and how ashen their faces are.

And oh yeah, Murray’s got copies of this Secret Memo. The ones with “OMIT FROM FR” (Federal Register) handwritten at the bottom. Does this not sound more Kremlinesque by the day, if the Kremlin had really been as devoted to their Partei as this White House is to theirs?

Buy stock in broom manufacturers. Demand is going to be exploding shortly.