"Wednesday Night Ambush"

Posted by Richard Blair at 7:33 AM on May 18, 2007.

All the pResident's Men II - The Thug Years

A screenplay by Richard Blair

FADE IN ON:

NIGHTTIME IN WASHINGTON, D.C.


A lone, black government towncar ignores traffic signals as it speeds through darkened and mostly deserted streets of the nation's capitol, the pavement slickened by an early March rain. Rushing past the Watergate Hotel, and halting under the portico at the receiving entrance of George Washington University Hospital, two shadowy figures emerge from the limousine. Both are wearing black London Fog raincoats clenched tightly against the cool dampness; one of the men is carrying a legal portfolio...

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I screen-grabbed the image (top right) for posterity from the front webpage of today's washingtonpost.com. You can mark this day on your calendar as the moment in history that the Washington Post began to invoke shades of Watergate - against George W. Bush - What did Bush know, and When?.

Clicking on the front page link takes the reader to the daily editorial, titled (curiously enough) Caller ID, which reads in part:

IT DOESN'T much matter whether President Bush was the one who phoned Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's hospital room before the Wednesday Night Ambush in 2004. It matters enormously, however, whether the president was willing to have his White House aides try to strong-arm the gravely ill attorney general into overruling the Justice Department's legal views. It matters enormously whether the president, once that mission failed, was willing nonetheless to proceed with a program whose legality had been called into question by the Justice Department...

And in fact, Bush did continue with that program for another couple of weeks, despite the complete and total reservations, and threatened resignations, of all the principals in the Department of Justice. With John Ashcroft having undergone major surgery only two days prior, the Bush administration attempted to ambush an ailing Ashcroft on March 11th, 2004. The Attorney General had ceded his powers to his deputy, James Comey, who in turn had refused to sign off on the administration's warrantless wiretap program.

Rebuffed by Comey's refusal, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card were dispatched (apparently by George Bush himself) to Ashcroft's bedside in an attempt to seek his blessing. And he refused, also. So the administration continued with the program, despite legal reservations by the senior leadership of the Department of Justice.

The Washington Post editorial continues:

Under the Constitution, the president has the final authority in the executive branch to say what the law is. But as a matter of presidential practice, this is breathtaking...

...The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain. That cannot be allowed to happen.

Today, the newspaper of record, the one which was the blunt instrument of destruction of the Nixon administration, has finally placed George Bush in the crosshairs. In consciously invoking a play on some of the most damning words of the Watergate scandal, the Bush administration has been put on notice: the end is near.

Somewhere, Katherine Graham is smiling.

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Tagged as: george bush, alberto gonzales

Richard Blair is a Philadelphia area freelance writer, and the blogmaster at All Spin Zone.