Alberto Gonzales Still Falling Down On The Job

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is still falling down on the job.  Now he has WSJ’s John Fund on his back over DOJ’s inexcusable treatment of the Sandy Berger 9/11 documents case:

We have only Mr. Berger’s word that he didn’t take anything else. The Justice Department secured his agreement to take a polygraph on the matter, but never followed through and administered it.
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Despite all of these unanswered questions, Mr. Berger was allowed to plead guilty last year to only a misdemeanor charge. As part of a plea agreement, the Justice Department asked him to pay a $10,000 fine for the violations, perform 100 hours of community service and lose his security clearance for just three years (meaning that he will be eligible to regain it just about the time the next president takes office). The presiding judge, outraged at the lenient plea bargain, bumped the fine up to $50,000.

The Inspector General’s report found that the papers Mr. Berger took outlined the adequacy of the government’s knowledge of terrorist threats in the U.S. in the final months of the Clinton administration–documents that could have been of some interest to the 9/11 Commission, before which Mr. Berger was scheduled to testify. The Washington Post buried news of the Inspector General’s report on page 7; the New York Times dumped it on page 36.

But the report did catch the attention of Rep. Tom Davis, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who last month, while he was still committee chairman, finished his own probe of the Berger affair. This week he and 17 other top Republicans wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to detail the deficiencies the committee has found in the Justice Department’s handling of the Berger case. They specifically asked him to administer the polygraph examination that Mr. Berger agreed to but was inexplicably never given.

While a polygraph is not admissible in court, it is a valuable tool investigators can use to lead them to other evidence. Andrew Napolitano, a former judge who is a legal analyst for Fox News, notes: “If they ask him, did you take document X, Y, Z, and he says no, and the polygraph shows that he’s lying, that will send them on a hunt for document X, Y, Z.” In addition, Mr. Berger would have to take the test under oath and thus could be prosecuted for perjury if he lied, even though his document-theft case is closed.

This all raises the question, does Gonzales want to get to the truth of this or not? If not, then he needs to be replaced immediately with someone who does.