"Spitzer, Nixon and Gonzales".........“I think it is a blight upon the Department of Justice

May 21, 2007, 8:00 am
Spitzer, Nixon and Gonzales
By Danny Hakim
As one might expect, Eliot Spitzer, the former New York attorney general turned governor, has some opinions about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. As one might expect, they are not kind.

“I think it is a blight upon the Department of Justice that Alberto Gonzales is still the attorney general,” Mr. Spitzer said in an interview last week.

“We are brought back to the days, the dark days of the Nixon era, where the tentacles of politics reach into the Department of Justice and threaten our core notions of what justice means,” he added.

Last week, the Justice Department’s former No. 2 man, James Comey, said at a Congressional hearing that Mr. Gonzales, above, while serving as White House counsel in 2004, tried to persuade a gravely ill John Ashcroft to reauthorize the controversial federal wiretapping program.

For part of Mr. Spitzer’s eight-year tenure as New York attorney general, Mr. Comey was the United States attorney based in Manhattan. Mr. Spitzer, who was not known to get along with all of his federal counterparts, said Mr. Comey was “the Norman Rockwell image of a marine, a Boy Scout, the image of rectitude and doing what is proper.”<snip>

http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/spitzer-nixon-and-gonzales/