Alberto Gonzales

The Bolten-Fielding Administration

Bob Fertik — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:52:01 -0400

So who threw Gonzo under the bus? Obviously it wasn't Bush, who was clearly furious when he delivered his extremely brief remarks - in strong contrast to his public display of affection for Karl Rove.

Rather, it looks like the dirty deed was done by White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and White House Counsel Fred Fielding, according to the NY Times.

The officials said he offered his resignation on Friday in a brief telephone conversation with Mr. Bush, who was at his ranch in Crawford, and that the president immediately accepted the resignation. On Sunday, Mr. Gonzales and his wife flew to the ranch for a consoling lunch where the resignation was confirmed.

But other Republicans close to the White House and Mr. Gonzales offered a different account, suggesting that the attorney general was eased out and that the process leading to his departure unfolded over several months as Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff, and Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, concluded that Mr. Gonzales had become a liability and quietly pushed for him to step down.

Mr. Gonzales had his defenders at the White House, chiefly Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser. The officials said that when Mr. Rove announced that he was leaving, Mr. Gonzales lost a protector.

“He was being protected, in large measure by Karl,” said a Republican close to the White House. When Mr. Rove left, the Republican said, “It further exposed that the only thing that was standing with him was the president of the United States.”

White House spokespeople said Monday that Mr. Bolten had not orchestrated Mr. Gonzales’s resignation. [Yeah like he's going to admit it - gimme a break.]

The likelihood that Mr. Gonzales was pressed to leave was strengthened by the shock the announcement caused at the Justice Department. Mr. Gonzales had told no one he was thinking about stepping aside and did not inform his chief of staff, Kevin O’Connor, until Sunday afternoon.

So how much unseen power are Bolten and Fielding actually exerting? And who wins when Cheney disagrees with them?

Inquiring minds want to know...

Gone-zo

Bob Fertik — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 09:03:19 -0400

NY Times has the scoop:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not announced immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.

Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the resignation had not yet been made public.

Gonzales' resignation comes in the face of a serious effort to impeach Gonzales, led by Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) and 27 co-sponsors. Our own Impeach Gonzales petition has over 55,000 signatures.

The TV coverage is a fascinating contrast to the resignation of Karl Rove. Gonzales, after all, was simply taking his orders from Rove - but Rove left the White House as a conquering hero, while Gonzales is leaving as an incompetent and corrupt hack.

Of course Gonzales (like Rove) is also a criminal, having authorized torture, warrantless wiretapping, and the politicization of the Justice Department - all of which are felonies. Now that Gonzales no longer has the power to investigate himself, it is critically important that Congress and/or a Special Prosecutor fully investigate Gonzales' crimes.

David Swanson says Congress needs to do a few things:
1. Refuse to confirm a new AG until the White House complies with all subpoenas
2. Recognize what the threat of impeachment achieved in the case of Gonzo
3. Start impeaching Cheney ASAP

What's your advice for Democrats in Congress?

Update 1: Gonzo's likely temporary replacement is Paul Clement, a far-right ideologue:

Clement, who grew up in suburban Milwaukee, has a perfectly appointed conservative résumé.

The youngest child of an accountant father and a stay-at-home mother, Clement attended Georgetown University, where he studied international economics and cut his political teeth with two internships, first for then-Sen. Bob Kasten, R-Wis., and then in the Ronald Reagan White House.

After graduating, Clement deferred law school, while earning a masters degree in economics from Cambridge University. In 1989, he began at Harvard Law School, where he served as Supreme Court editor for the Harvard Law Review. Clement went on to prestigious clerkships for GOP appointees Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In 1994, he accepted a job in the D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis, working in the high-powered appellate group led by one-time D.C. Circuit Judge and Solicitor General Kenneth Starr.

Clement called to take the job on the same day Starr signed on to serve as independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation. The senior partner’s absence worked out well for Clement, giving him the opportunity to play larger roles in cases and even argue two appeals as a young associate.

After 2 1/2 years at the firm, however, Clement found himself growing antsy. With Democrats in the White House, he took a job with Ashcroft, then a Republican senator from Missouri. Accepting a staff position on the Hill was an unconventional career move for an appellate practitioner, but ultimately sharpened Clement’s focus on pure litigation….

During his brief return to private practice, Clement collaborated with the conservative American Center for Law & Justice on two amicus briefs in Bush v. Gore, supporting George W. Bush on behalf of Republican voters….

Aside from [Ted] Olson, Clement is the only noncareer attorney in the solicitor general’s 19-lawyer office. The post for a political deputy was created in the early 1980s, in part to handle cases with an ideological edge. Clement’s unique role, as a top appellate litigator and trusted political aide, made him the natural candidate to assume responsibility for the DOJ’s terror docket, once it was consolidated in the solicitor general’s office.

Publicly, Clement has forcefully argued that the president has broad power in wartime to imprison those he deems enemies, indefinitely and without access to legal counsel. Clement’s allies suggest that behind closed doors he may counsel a more moderate stance.

No way in hell should Democrats accept him.

Update 2: The Busheviks are having a very hard time finding a permanent replacement. They floated Michael Chertoff's name over the weekend, but as Christy points out,

FEMA has lost and/or failed to account for a sum of money that is almost half of DHS’s entire budget

Chertoff would have a bit of a problem explaining that at confirmation hearings, so scratch his name off the list. Chertoff also defended alleged terrorist financier Dr. Magdy Elamir.

Other names include Ted Olson, who was far too visible during Clinton's impeachment and Bush v. Gore to be acceptable to Democrats.

The only acceptable name being mentioned is James Comey, but he has real integrity and would actually prosecute high crimes like torture and warrantless wiretapping - so there's no way in hell that Bush would nominate him.

Politico's Mike Allen, who is Karl Rove's ventriloquist's dummy, is pushing Fran Townsend, so keep an eye on her.

Speaking of Rove, when he running the White House there was a firm rule against letting someone resign without naming his replacement on the spot. So the absence of a designated successor shows Rove's successor Ed Gillespie doesn't have to clout that Rove had. As a result, we're is a free-for-all between various rightwing factions within the GOP.

Update 3: Here are the statements from leading Democrats:

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Commtitee:

"A Special Prosecutor must still be appointed to investigate the Attorney General's false statements to Congress and to investigate the apparent criminal violations of law by Attorney General Gonzales and others, including President Bush, by initiating the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program."

That's good - but what about torture? And what about continuing investigations by Nadler's House Judiciary Committee, since no Special Prosecutor is likely?

Update 4: John Nichols nails it as always:

As Counsel from 2001 to 2005, Gonzales blocked requests from the General Accounting Office for information about Enron officials meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force. He refused requests from congressional committees for information that the House and Senate had a right -- and a need. He made the legal case for torture, despite the fact that the Constitution bars cruel and unusual punishment. He outlined schemes for subverting the judicial system and its rules by making terror suspects eligible for military tribunals. He helped convince Bush to refuse to afford prisoners held at Guantanamo the basic protections afforded prisoner-of-war under treaties the United States had accepted as the law of the land.

As the nation's 80th Attorney General -- a position he took in February, 2005, after the Senate vote 60-36 to confirm his nomination -- Gonzales extended his representation of Bush into should be an independent federal agency. He defended the president's authorization of an illegal warrantless wiretapping program. He accepted the "extraordinary rendition" of suspects from U.S. custody to that of torture regimes. And he turned the Department of Justice into an extension of Karl Rove's White House political shop.

Revelations about the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys who were seen by the administration as insufficiently political in their investigations and prosecutions opened up an investigation that has begun to confirm a broad scheme to politicize the Justice Department's work in the area of voting rights -- a scheme apparently designed by Rove to suppress turnout by minorities and others who might vote Democratic...

The essential question with regard to Gonzales remains the same as the question that Leahy laid down when Rove said he would go: What are these people so desperate to hide?

The answer is that, just as Gonzales and Rove served Bush rather than the Constitution, they now seek with their resignations to protect Bush -- and Vice President Cheney -- from investigations that are necessary to any serious effort to restore the primacy of the founding document in the affairs of the nation.

Only a continued inquiry into the lawlessness of the soon-to-be-former Attorney General will achieve what is the essential purpose of this Congress: the restoring of the rule of law to a country deeply damaged by petty little men who chose personal loyalties and political expediency over their duty to the Republic.

Will Sponsors of Gonzales' Impeachment Join in Sponsoring Cheney's?

Chip — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 22:30:18 -0400

Congressional representatives from Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have sponsored H. Res. 589, a bill to impeach Alberto Gonzales. Will they also sign on to H. Res. 333, to sponsor Dick Cheney's impeachment? Why not thank them for sponsoring H. Res. 589, and ask them to sponsor H. Res. 333? Is YOUR rep listed? See the list here!

Can We IMPEACH With Facebook Alone?

thepen — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 04:07:20 -0400

We know that activism works. In just the last 24 hours Debra Bowen decertified every DRE (hackable electronic voting machine) in CA, and she did this courageous thing at least in part because of the tens of thousands of messages she was getting from her constituents in the state. We know. We were involved in helping to mobilize those voices.

So too with impeachment. The only hurdle between the consensus of the people and restoring Constitutional integrity is our own dedication in speaking out and encouraging everyone else we can to do the same. And as we look for opportunities to reach out to our fellow citizens with calls to action, we cannot help but notice that the fastest growing networked community on the internet is the Facebook® web site. In large part this is because they have opened up their platform to member created applications, which in practical use makes their entire base of about 30 million participants accessible to the activism of each other.

IMPEACHMENT ACTION PAGE: http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/

The directly link above will take you to the new VOICES application created by us on the Facebook Platform, which enables any Facebook member to create their own action pages without limit on any issue of their own they care about. They can be either advocacy pages which take one side of an issue, or voting pages which act as a referendum. Either way these action pages send your messages in real time to all your members of Congress at once, plus a letter to the editor of your nearest daily local newspaper if you like, all with one click.

Of course the number one hottest political issue in the country right now is whether Congress should commence impeachment hearings immediately, and against Vice President Cheney in particular, though Alberto Gonzales, Bush and others are also deserving of judgement. In the case of Cheney the votes in the National Cheney Impeachment Poll are coming up fast on 100,000, with 99.17 of those being Yes votes to impeach. And that is why we have chosen this question as the first action page to feature in the new VOICES interface.

IMPEACHMENT ACTION PAGE: http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/

If you are already a member of Facebook we ask you to visit this page, vote on it, and then share it with everyone else in your personal network. There are applications in the Facebook community with millions of users. That's what it will take to make impeachment happen. Literally millions of people must contact their members of Congress and pressure them to stand up against the Cheney White House. These are feasible numbers. Among the various activist groups we have hundreds of thousands already. Facebook alone could turn the tide.

Even if you are not a member of Facebook already please take a look at the action page creation function in the new Voices application. We are throwing the door wide open to democracy here. You can take any stand you like on any issue out there, or throw it out for a fair Yes/No vote. We believe that if the voice of the people were in fact expressed it would be naturally progressive. We are not afraid of democracy. We seek to encourage. Each of us has but one voice. But to bring about true policy change we must join our voices together. Which is why we called the new application . . . VOICES.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

Inslee to Introduce Gonzales Impeachment on Tuesday

Bob Fertik — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:47:19 -0400

Satyam has the news, courtesy of MSNBC:

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) is introducing legislation that would require the House Judiciary Committee and the House of Representatives to begin an impeachment investigation into Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in the wake of his damaging testimony last week. The legislation reads:

Resolved: That the Committee on the Judiciary shall investigate fully whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach Alberto Gonzales for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Tell your Representatives to Impeach Alberto Gonzales!

GonzoGate: Another Top Justice Official Quits

Chip — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 02:36:14 -0400

Another top Justice official quits

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Another top Justice Department official involved in the controversial firing of several U.S. Attorneys has announced he’s resigning.

Mike Elston, chief of staff to departing Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty is stepping down next week, Justice Department officials said Friday.

Elston’s departure had been anticipated after McNulty announced in May that he will leave the Justice Department this summer to pursue a career in the private sector.

Documents released by the Justice Department to Congressional investigators have shown Elston was involved in discussions with other high level Justice officials about plans to remove eight U.S. attorneys last year.

The controversy has already prompted the resignations under pressure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson and his Senior Counsel and White House liaison Monica Goodling. Michael Battle who headed the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys which oversees the federal prosecutors resigned voluntarily.

Gonzales has announced he expects to serve through the remaining 18 months of the Bush presidency.

Impeach Gonzalez - Watch the Video, Sign the Petition?

Chip — Tue, 22 May 2007 05:17:09 -0400

Who Cares? Why Does It Matter?

If The Millstone (GONZALES) Were Around The Other Neck

thepen — Thu, 17 May 2007 19:16:48 -0400

TELL CONGRESS TO REMOVE GONZALES BY CONSTITUTIONAL FORCE IF NECESSARY

ACTION PAGE: http://www.millionphonemarch.com/impeach_gonzales.php

You can call toll free at 800-828-0498, 800-459-1887 or 800-614-2803 and ask for your own House member and Senators.

For an administration in which utter smirking defiance of law and the will of the American people is the only operational mode, IMPEACHMENT is the only remedy.

How bad can it possibly get before Congress will act? In explosive testimony this week before the Senate, the former number two official in the Justice apartment, James B. Comey, testified that Alberto Gonzales tried to bully a deathly sick John D. Ashcroft into signing off on a secret and massive domestic wiretap scheme which had already been determined to be profoundly illegal. Even the Washington Post was compelled to editorialize on Wednesday as follows:

"the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source."

And if that were not bad enough, Gonzales had previously testified UNDER OATH, that there had been no disagreements in the department about implementation of the program. So he just bald-faced lied and perjured himself again, and again, and again. And he's still doing it.

The situation is so bad that 56 members of Alberto's Harvard Law school graduating class took out an ad also in the Post excoriating him for his outlaw abuse of power. The Harvard Crimson further reports that there was NO dissent whatsoever in this from members of that class, even among those who for professional reasons could not sign on publicly.

So what is the response of Congress? Some Democrats today proposed a no confidence vote. What exactly is that supposed to accomplish? How many times have you heard Bush say, "Well, he has my confidence", in the face of dramatically manifest incompetence and malfeasance by his appointed cronies? When is Congress going to confront the fact that we are dealing with a Constitutionally criminal organization in the White House from top to bottom?

When will Congress stop being a damn debating society and exercise the POWER we gave them in November.? What part of exercising power don't they get?

Look at the side show going on right now about another Bush gang member, Wolfowitz, who has long outstayed his welcome the World Bank, and still will not give up power until they pry it out of his fingers. It was actually reported yesterday that Wolfowitz was demanding that the bank accept culpability for some part of his wrongdoing as a condition of stepping down. Isn't that just a little like a bank robber demanding that a bank share guilt for making itself too easy to rob?

We'll frankly be surprised if Bush doesn't demand for Gonzales a seat on the Supreme Court as part of his severance package.

ACTION PAGE: http://www.millionphonemarch.com/impeach_gonzales.php

What'cha gonna do, Congress? You better start dusting of that impeachment clause in the Constitution quick, fast and in a hurry. We're really gonna need it.

If the millstone were around the other neck, every right wing cable news pod person would be screaming for impeachment, not only for Gonzales, but for the whole lying, stealing, preemptive war murdering lot of them. Falwell would be howling from his casket right now. Maybe it's time for us do a lot more howling of our own.

UltraWatergate: Is the Warantless Wiretapping Program Just Massive Spying on Democrats?

Bob Fertik — Wed, 16 May 2007 21:14:37 -0400

As always, Digby is right on target. When Gonzales testified in 2006 about the illegal NSA wiretapping program, he cryptically hinted there was more than one program (video).

The exchange seemed so odd that I wondered if the Democrats didn't have some information that there was another domestic surveillance program that they couldn't discuss publicly.

We learned more about that program from James Comey's testimony on Tuesday, as a TPMMuckraker noted:

When the warrantless wiretap surveillance program came up for review in March of 2004, it had been running for two and a half years. We still don't know precisely what form the program took in that period, although some details have been leaked. But we now know, courtesy of Comey, that the program was so odious, so thoroughly at odds with any conception of constitutional liberties, that not a single senior official in the Bush administration's own Department of Justice was willing to sign off on it. In fact, Comey reveals, the entire top echelon of the Justice Department was prepared to resign rather than see the program reauthorized, even if its approval wasn't required. They just didn't want to be part of an administration that was running such a program.

This wasn't an emergency program; more than two years had elapsed, ample time to correct any initial deficiencies. It wasn’t a last minute crisis; Ashcroft and Comey had both been saying, for weeks, that they would withhold approval. But at the eleventh hour, the President made one final push, dispatching his most senior aides to try to secure approval for a continuation of the program, unaltered.

Digby writes:

I have believed from the get-go that this surveillance was being used for political purposes. The FISA court is a rubber stamp court that will allow virtually anything that could remotely be construed as necessary for national security. After 9/11 they would have been even more lenient. And if they weren't, the administration could easily have gone to the Republican congress and requested changes to the law and they would have gotten it.

How over-the-top must this have been for staunch Republican John Ashcroft to have risen from his ICU bed to argue against it and the entire top echel on of the DOJ were preparing to resign?These are not ordinary times and the law enforcement community has not been particularly squeamish about stretching the Bill of Rights. None of those people are bleeding heart liberals or candidates for the presidency of the ACLU. For them to be this adamant, it must have been something completely beyond the pale.

My suspicion has always been that there was some part of this program --- or an entirely different program --- that included spying on political opponents. Even spying on peace marchers and Greenpeace types wouldn't seem to me to be of such a substantial departure from the agreed upon post 9/11 framework that it would cause such a reaction from the top brass, nor would it be so important to the president that he would send Gonzales and Card into the ICU to get Ashcroft to sign off on it while he was high on drugs.

Digby then quotes an excerpt from Jim Moore's Bush's Brain about Karl Rove's 1968 rummaging through an opposing candidate's garbage to dig up dirt, and segues to Watergate (in which young Rove was involved):

Remember: Watergate was about bugging the Democratic National Committee. The "3rd rate burglary" was to replace an illegal bug that had been planted on the telephones of prominent Democrats.

The lesson of Watergate for the chagrined Republicans was that they needed to be more forceful in assuming executive power and they needed to be more sophisticated about their campaign espionage. This is what they've done.

Anybody who even dreams that these guys are not using all their government power to spy on political enemies is being willfully naive. It is what they do. It is the essence of their political style. This is Nixon's Republican party and they have finally achieved a perfect ability to carry out his vision of political governance: L'etat C'est Moi. If the president does it that means it's not illegal.

And he concludes:

After what we now know about the politicization of the DOJ by Karl Rove himself, this seems even more obvious to me.

After all, as Greenwald pointed out in his post, it's awfully odd that in all these meetings, the FBI was involved but the NSA wasn't. The FBI does domestic surveillance. Why were they involved in this at all?

Why indeed?

Gonzales: It's Time to Impeach or Jail

Bob Fertik — Wed, 16 May 2007 14:39:46 -0400

Leftblogs are boiling mad at James Comey's dramatic testimony about the 2004 trip by Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card to then-AG John Ashcroft's hospital bed to pressure Ashcroft to approve the illegal NSA wiretapping program.

("Loyal Bushie" David Johnston of the NY Times featured Bush's role in ending the conflict by siding with Comey, but failed to report that Bush started the conflict by approving the blatantly illegal program and then personally calling Mrs. Ashcroft to arrange the shocking visit.)

Bush, Gonzales, and Card would have gotten their way if Comey hadn't raced over to the hospital and arrived before Gonzales and Card. Even more shockingly, Comey had to persuade FBI director Mueller to order the FBI agents outside the hospital room to ignore any order from Gonzales and Card to eject Comey. Ultimately, Comey and Ashcroft had to threaten to quit in order to get Bush to reluctantly agree to something resembling the rule of law - although the "legality" of the final action remains a deep dark secret.

So it's no wonder that leftblogs are now calling Gonzales and Card "thugs." But there's infinitely more at stake than namecalling.

First, it looks like Gonzales committed perjury before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as looseheadprop details:

When asked about Gonzales' statement about that he was not involved in the firings — Comey not only said that he (Comey) was more well versed in that subject than most, but also stated an assumption that Gonzales had since "corrected" his testimony. I immediately thought were did he get an idea like that? Did I miss a news item?

Specter had to tell the world that AGAG had NOT corrected his testimony and then Specter puts out a plea for Gonzales to "recant". What's that all about? It sounded like a last ditch effort to get Gonzales to avoid Scooter Libby's fate.

Second, Gonzales also perjured himself on February 26, 2006 when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee about internal disputes over the NSA wiretapping program:

There has not been any serious disagreement, including – and I think this is accurate – there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the President has confirmed.

But Comey testified the dispute was so bad he had to race to Ashcroft's bedside, arrange FBI protection, confront Gonzales and Card, demand a witness at a later meeting with Card, and threaten to resign with Ashcroft. Senators Feingold, Schumer, Kennedy, and Durbin just wrote Gonzales giving him one last chance to stay out of the slammer:

In light of Mr. Comey’s testimony yesterday, do you stand by your 2006 Senate and House testimony, or do you wish to revise it?

Third, Gonzales also perjured himself during his April appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee when

he claimed that he'd always rejected the idea of using a Patriot Act provision to appoint handpicked U.S. attorneys and keep them in place indefinitely without Senate confirmation as "interim" U.S. attorneys.

But Kyle Sampson told congressional investigators that Karl Rove's senior aide Sara Taylor "was upset when the Attorney General finally “rejected” this use of the interim authority" in January after Senators Leahy and Feinstein began asking questions about the U.S. Attorney scandal.

Finally, Tuesday's hearings coincided with a 2 pm Senate Judiciary Committee deadline for a subpoena to Gonzales to turn over

any of Karl Rove's emails in the [Justice] Department's possession that might be relevant to the U.S. attorney firings. The deadline came and went. And now Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) are angry.

“You ignored the subpoena, did not come forward today, did not produce the documents and did not even offer an explanation for your noncompliance,” the senators wrote in a lettter to Alberto Gonzales today. “Your action today is in defiance of the Committee’s subpoena without explanation of any legal basis for doing so.” You can read the letter here.

The senators set a new deadline, this Friday at May 18, 10 AM. If the Justice Department does not respond to the subpoena, the senators ask that they at least explain why they're not responding "so that the Chairman and the Committee can assess any objections to the subpoena or privileges claimed by the Department."

"The Committee intends to get to the truth," they conclude.

Leahy and Specter can beg Gonzales as much as they want, but everyone knows what will happen - Gonzales will "gum it to death," making fools out of the Senators (1).

If the Senators don't want to be made into fools, they have two choices: either ask the House to impeach Gonzales and then vote to remove him in the Senate, or go directly to a Senate trial under penalty of jail. As Kagro X has patiently explained, this is the forgotten power of "inherent contempt:"

Under the inherent contempt power, the individual is brought before the House or Senate by the Sergeant-at-Arms, tried at the bar of the body, and can be imprisoned. The purpose of the imprisonment or other sanction may be either punitive or coercive. Thus, the witness can be imprisoned for a specified period of time as punishment, or for an indefinite period (but not, at least in the case of the House, beyond the adjournment of a session of the Congress) until he agrees to comply. The inherent contempt power has been recognized by the Supreme Court as inextricably related to Congress’s constitutionally-based power to investigate.

Senators, pre-season is over. As Cheney would say, "it's game time."

(1) Late Wednesday the Justice Department gave the Senate Judiciary Committee all of its emails to Karl Rove about the U.S. Attorney firings. How many exactly? One. Looks like someone's been doing some serious scrubbing...