After the basic underlying ugliness of tampering with national security for political revenge (against a spouse, at that), one of the aspects of the Plame scandal that has always most amazed and disgusted me is the role of then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. Forgotten amidst all the current finger pointing as to who said what to whom when and with which mental state was that when Gonzales learned that the Justice Dept. had started an official investigation into the leak, Gonzales waited twelve hours before putting the White House staff on notice that they had to preserve documents and electronic files. Which seemed than and seems now like an open invitation to obstruction of justice (AKA “shredding and deleting”).
Well, it’s forgotten no longer; what’s more it seems that Gonzales did tell White House Chief of Staff Andy Card right away. And who did Card tell and when? And what did they do?
