Stories Behind the Names Alberto Gonzales

Aughie and Nia explore the career of Alberto Gonzales, the first Hispanic American to serve as U.S. Attorney General. 

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Welcome to civil discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of
the American government and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your
everyday life. Now, your host, Nia Rogers, Public Affairs Librarian, and doctor John Augenbauh,
political science professor.
Hey, Aughie.
Good morning, Nia. How are you?
I'm really good. How are you?
I'm doing fine. I'm looking forward to today's episode. Well, I look forward to all of our episodes. But
this one.
Me too. I like the time I spend with you. I always learn something. This one, I learned a lot. I didn't
really know much about this individual. Stories behind the names. Sometimes listeners, sometimes
it's me. Like, I pick a person, and I know something about them, or in a couple of the instances, I was
the one who did the research. Mostly it's Aggie that does the research. I know I'm a librarian, and he
does the research weird. But he always finds these fascinating details about people that I miss, and
it's because he reads really quickly. He can read a whole book about an individual to prep out an
episode about them, and I can't read that quickly.
On today's topic. The episode is going to the story behind the name of a rather prominent attorney
general of recent vintage, Alberto Reinaldo Gonzalez.
Can I just say, how old you are that you think that 2005 to 2007 is recent vintage? With some people
listening to this podcast will be like, "Oh, I was in diapers." Anyway, Geesersin.
In terms of the scope of US history.
Yes.
That is recent. It is the past quarter century. But to Nia's previous point, I probably read if this sounds
like a humble brag, I apologize. I probably read easily two dozen popular media articles about Alberto
Gonzales. I read easily a dozen or so academic journal articles. Even delved into a couple of books
already written about the Bush 43 administration. That had chapters on Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales.
Kids, that's how we do research.
Yes.
Is that we read a whole bunch of stuff so that we can get a good view of the individual.
Then I try to check those oddities or things that I come across and.
Make you go. Really? Then you have to make sure that that really is true. You've got to be careful
because sometimes people will write stuff that is not quite accurate.
Yeah
Let's be kind and say that.
Alberto Gonzales served as the 80th US Attorney General. He served from 2005 to 2007. He was the
highest-ranking Hispanic American in the executive branch of government in US history until the
appointment of Marco Rubio as the Secretary of State in 2025. For those of you who don't know, the
way scholars usually rank executive branch departments, there is the big four. We have defense.
Trump administration calls it War, State, Treasury, and then the Justice Department. The head of the
Justice Department is the US Attorney General.
The plural of that is the US attorneys Attorney General. Not attorney generals.
Yes.
Which always messes people up. It used to mess me up as a writer. The attorneys is the plural part,
not the general. They're not a bunch of generals. They are a bunch of attorneys that are general.
Yeah.
It's not a general as in the military. It is a general as in broad. That general refers to you are the broad
attorney for the United States.
United States. That's right. He would have had a fascinating career if he had not even been appointed
attorney general because he had served as the Secretary of State for Texas. For those of you who are
unfamiliar with state government in the United States, secretaries of state and again, that's the way
you say plural. Secretaries of state in most states are in charge of administration for the state,
When you register a business, you almost always register it with the Secretary of State.
Secretary of State.
In a state. They do the administrative.
Work of the state. All the overhead functions of state government typically reports to the Secretary of
State.
Like maintenance and oversight, HR. That stuff reports to the Secretary of State.
He was also a Texas Supreme Court Justice. He was nominated by George Bush.
He was Gov.
When was he was Gov.
Remember, Bush was governor of Texas before he was president of the United States.
He was White House Counsel. Again, we've talked about that position. White House Counsel is
basically the lawyer's office, pretty much the president's attorneys. He was the first Hispanic to hold
that office in the history of the United States, which was created during the late 1920s with the
creation of the executive office of the president. He had a rags-to-riches, immigrant, if you will,
experience. He was born in San Antonio, Texas, Catholic family. He was raised in Humble, Texas. I
actually had to look that up. It's a town outside of the city.
The town named Humble, not a humble part of Texas. Because I'm entirely certain there is a Humble
in Texas.
Texas is his family.
I'm saying that with love in my heart for Texas.
His family is of Mexican descent. He was the second of eight children born to Maria and Pablo
Gonzalez. His dad died in 1982. When he came to the United States, his father was a migrant worker,
then a construction worker with a second-grade education. His mom was a stay-at-home mom, raised
eight children, and multiple of research accounts. She had a sixth-grade education. His family of 10
lived in a small two-room bedroom home built by his fathers and uncles. They had no telephone and
no hot running water. He has said publicly he's not aware whether his family entered the United
States legally or not. It was never really discussed in his family. In today's, if you will, immigration
debate, there would have been a good chance that his family would be targeted for deportation or at
least deportation review by the current presidential administration.
Aughie, can I throw in a little detail here? He has no telephone. He has no running water. He was born
in 1955. He was not born in the 1800s.
Yes.
He was born in 1955. That's just telling you how financially strapped his family was?
Yes. Who's Word?
Because in 1955, most people owned a telephone. Most people had running water in 1955, but his
family did not have those amenities.
He attended MacArthur High School in Harris County. He was an honor student, and when he
graduated from high school, he enlisted in the Air Force, and he did a four-year enlistment.
It was not a common thing for poor families, either, right, for a kid to go into the military to, well, one,
it's a job, but also two, it often involves an education.
That's right. It was not uncommon. I even know this in my own family, Nia. My mom's uncle, two of my
cousins, I grew up in a small town. They were not, shall we say, on the college track. In fact, they
didn't have a college track, in the 1950s and 60s. If you wanted to go ahead and find a good job out of
high school, it was not unusual, if you were born to a poor family in the United States, to enlist in the
military. You hoped the country was not at war.
My brother went into the Air Force because after my parents divorced, there was a lack of money, as
there often is for women who are divorced. He went into the Air Force and got his education that way.
Pretty common thing for less financially able families.
You served one year at Fort Yukon in Alaska. Guys, I looked this up. I looked this.
Yukon.
I looked this up on the map. You want to talk about being out in the wilderness. Good.
San Antonio to Fort Yukon. I'm not entirely certain. That would feel like you had left the planet and
gone to a different planet. Like, that would be so. Those extremes are pretty extreme.
He was released from active duty and was admitted to attend the United States Air Force Prep School.
Then, after completing the prep school, he received an appointment to the United States Air Force
Academy. Before he completed his tenure at the Academy, he left the academy and was released
from his enlistment contract, and he transferred to Rice University in Houston, which is where. Yeah,
go ahead.
The way those contracts work, you have a four-year contract, and if you're not finished with school
and you wanted to stay in school, you would sign up for another four-year contract, which is what he
chose not to do. He chose to leave. But Rice is like a big-deal school, isn't it?
Oh, it's a very prestigious private university in Texas. I believe it is associated with the Baptist
religion. I think it's Nia, could you look that up?
He's Catholic, isn't he? Wasn't he Catholic?
I may be confusing Rice with Baylor University. I know Baylor's Baptist. What's the religious affiliation
of Rice?
Real time has no official religious affiliation and is non-denominational, so you are mixing it up, Baylor.
Got you. But it is a private university with very high standards academically. He was chosen as a
Charles Parkhill scholar in the Political Science Department, graduated with honors in 1979, so he
would've been 24-years-old. Was immediate applied for and was admitted to Harvard Law School, and
received his Harvard law degree in standard three years
Rice is ranked 17th by the US News and World Report.
Top 20 university academically until 60.
Of course, Harvard is I don't know what Harvard's ranking is, but I think it's like third or second.
Yeah, it floats back and forth from 1, 2, 3, occasionally, it drops to five, but then it moves back up.
If you heard sarcasm, when Aughie said drops it's because he meant that sarcastically.
It's like current Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett got her law degree in Notre Dame. I like the
joke with my students in class. Yeah, she was really slumming. Notre Dame is a top 15 law school.
Harvard is ranked number 1 currently.
Currently. Yeah.
But I think it occasionally drops to two when you look at Princeton.
Yale, yeah.
Notre Dame is ranked 20th.
Oh, the inhumanity, but compared to our colleagues on the Supreme Court, almost all of them.
I'm sure they're like, Oh, you went to Notre Dame. That's so cute and the rest of us are like, really?
Because Aughie and I, if you can't tell, went to state schools.
Yes, we did.
Our state schools were perfectly serviceable, good schools, both of them that we went to. He and I
both gone to two public schools to get our degrees and they were both good schools, but not like that.
Come on.
We talked about this with Condoleezza Rice, right?
Yeah. She's a rock star.
We're of a generation where you could be born in a family, I'm first generation at college, you're first
generation college, too, right?
I am. No, my mom went to nursing school.
Okay. But nevertheless, we both were in working poor families, we were not middle class, right?
No.
So you went to college. The thinking was you went to college, like in Alberto Gonzales family, right?
Right. You get out to get into a house that has running water and a telephone. Like, that's the theory,
is that you're trying to get into and then your kids are getting into a house with WiFi and then their
kids are getting into a house where AI will then kill them. But that's the goal is to move your children.
That's why his father's second grade education and his mother's sixth grade education, that was
probably higher than previous generations of their family have gone, so that's the goal is that you try
to. He's clearly shining in the goal as far as being intelligent and being willing to work hard and all
that other stuff that goes into improving incrementally generation to generation.
He gets out of Harvard Nia, and then he goes to work in private practice with one of the most
prominent law firms in Houston, Vinson & Elkins, where within 12 years, he becomes a partner.
Holy cow.
One of the first Hispanic partners in its history.
That would have been his late 30s, early 40s, he's a young man to be a partner.
Yes.
Because usually partners are, I think of them as old dead white guys, even though they're not dead,
and they're not always white, but they're almost always old.
Older, yes.
Because you also to be a partner have to buy in, usually. You have to have banked up enough money
because partnerships involve you investing in the firm in a financial.
Yeah, it shows your commitment to the firm and the firm uses the buy in of the partners for operating
expenses. So that way, all of the billed client hours then go ahead and pay the partners dividends.
That's how you make extra money as a partner. So it's an investment. He becomes a partner, but
then does something really, really unusual. He resigns from the law firm to become the general
counsel to Texas Governor George W Bush. Now, he had met Bush socially because the Bush family
very prominent in Texas, in Texas politics.
The father was a governor? No. Was he a governor or just a senator? I shouldn't say just, but you
know what I mean?
He was a senator,
Then Junior was a governor and Jeb was a governor of Florida.
Florida, yes.
This is an accomplished political family.
Family, yes. Within three years, Governor Bush appoints him the Secretary of State, so this is 1997.
He's carrying enough water that he's given a pretty prestigious.
Yes, two years later, Bush nominates him and he was confirmed to sit on the Texas Supreme Court
and in Texas, you are nominated by the governor, confirmed by the Senate, but then you have to run
for what's known as a retention election. The seat he was appointed to fill was up for retention
election one year after his appointment.
Oh, so it's not automatically one year in. He could have been appointed to somebody who had two
years left on there or three years left in. It just happened to be a year.
Yep. He was elected to a full six year term because that's the length of terms in Texas courts in 2000.
In the November 2000 election.
Yes.
He's running there while Bush is running V Gore.
Yep. There was no guarantee, that one, Bush was going to win, and as some of our listeners may
recall, it was one of the most closely divided elections in US history. Eventually, Bush is declared the
victor. Then, as we've discussed on this podcast episode, in particular with our colleague Bill Norman,
once the president gets elected, roughly, for the first six to nine months, all they are is a glorified HR
manager, because all they're doing is hiring.
They're just hiring. They are the hiring manager of the executive branch. That's what you should say
you're running for. I'm not running for president, I'll be doing that six months from now. But what I'm
running for right now is the hiring manager for the executive branch. So Bush wins in 2000. He
becomes president.
In 2021, January of 2021.
Gonzalez goes ahead and finishes most of his retention.
He serves only for about nine months. Well, less than nine months. Six months cause remember, the
retention election in Texas was also the same time as Bush running for president. Bush wins, and
remember, he doesn't get told he wins until the third week of December.
Of December. Memories relived.
Because of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case. Bush takes office in January. Basically, Bush has
even less time for his transition than most presidents. Most presidents end up having about two
months.
Get that sweet spot of, like a week after the election, they're like, Okay, they're declared and it's
done and now they get to start picking people and naming names and trying to get up. The first thing
they do as a chief of staff. I need a guy to help me get things done or a woman to help me get things
done.
Yeah, so they create a transition team that usually has a chairperson or co-chair people. Then the
transition team goes ahead and as you just pointed out, Mr. President, here are some people who we
think would be a really good chief of staff for you in the West Wing, the executive office of the
president. Then they fill out those positions. Interestingly enough, Alberto Gonzales was one of the
first people picked to be his White House counsel. Bush trusted him.
He's like Alberto. I want him to come and work for me.
As my wife.
My legal advisor.
My legal advisor.
That's what the Office of White House Counsel. They don't necessarily defend the president so much
as they go to the president and go, You should not do this.
Do that.
Sir, this is a bad idea.
Idea.
They're often the grown up in the room. They are. They're often the legal grown up in there. I
shouldn't say the grown up in but they are the legal grownup in the room. That comes on pretty
quickly then for him to be in the White House Council.
Within basically nine months, the Bush administration has to pivot from, we're going to govern the
country to how do we respond to the 911 attacks, and Gonzalez ends up being thrust into a very
important position because Nia, as you just described, the White House Counsel's office is supposed to
be the "grown up" in the West Wing. They're the ones who say, Mr. President, you do have the legal
authority to do X, or you have the constitutional authority to do X, or no, you don't on either account.
This is where Gonzalez's work becomes controversial.
Because Oh, can I bring it up? Can I mention it?
Yeah, go ahead.
He's the one who supports the notion of "enhanced interrogation techniques." Which if you are
wondering what that is, that is waterboarding somebody. That is torture. The FBI was like, I don't
know, torture doesn't always get us the best information, because really what happens under torture
is that somebody will eventually just tell you something, so you stop. That's how torture works. But he
was a supporter of that enhanced interrogation message.
He authored a memo that explored whether or not the Geneva Convention, which was signed post
World War II, applied whether the section of the Geneva Conventions, which is Section 3, treatment of
prisoners of war applied to Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan. His memo said, no,
because they were not prisoners of war because officially, Al-Qaeda and Taliban were fighters
independent of recognized nation states. Therefore, neither the Geneva Conventions nor any US
constitutional language apply to their treatment. That was the legal part.
He basically said the Geneva Conventions were outdated.
That's right.
Because they weren't keeping up with how modern warfare takes place. Modern warfare is very rarely
state on state anymore. It is now non state actors either against a state or against another non state
actor. He's like, Man, that's old news. You can't be thinking of it that way.
In fact, not only did he say that in the memo. He said it in testimony in front of Congress. He has said
it publicly a number of times since then. We were in a new war, a new situation, and those techniques
that were previously banned, we concluded would give us real time information to stop future
terrorist attacks, which he said the overwhelming majority of the American population was like, we
can't have any future attacks, which he's correct, but frequently the law does not respond to public
opinion.
Well, and later, he said, I'm not saying the Geneva Conventions are bad. I'm just saying they weren't
modern enough to deal with. But he tried to walk it back a little bit. He tried to say, Well, we didn't
want to just erase the Geneva Convention completely, and I'm like, Well, but you do when you say
that it's okay to waterboard some people. I don't know. I had a lot of feelings about that at the time,
and I still have a lot of feelings about that because I don't think that those techniques actually work.
I think time has shown they don't generally work. That is not the way. The best way to get intelligence
is embedded agents that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money, and you have to
protect people and put them in positions where they can't be found out and all that other stuff. It's
hard to do.
This is where the political runs counter to the legal. It also runs counter to, if you will, the managerial
because, Nia, what you just described requires planning, patience, and again, for our younger
listeners, the American public did not have the patience for what it would take to go ahead and do the
things to get the quality intelligence. We basically screwed up after the Cold War ended and thought
we were not going to be a target of any attack. We didn't think terrorists were.
Certainly not a major.
We screwed up. The American public wanted an immediate response, and the Bush 43 administration
was balancing competing imperatives, because the political was like, you can't wait. The legal says,
well, we got this elephant in the room known as the Geneva Conventions. Then you got people in the
government who are saying, enhanced interrogation techniques don't usually give us good
intelligence. They were like, any intelligence is better than not having no intelligence, back to Alberto?
It's a classic public administration problem.
Back to Alberto, one of the criticisms that arose at this time, and it basically stayed with him until he
resigned as attorney general, was that he was too much of a yes man for the Bush administration.
I just say something. People now who think that Donald Trump has surrounded himself with people
who only say yes to him or only go along with his what I will gently call his insanities, is they think
that's new. I'm like, oh, no. Presidents have a long history of saying, get me a guy who will say yes.
Nixon went through like five guys who wouldn't say yes. Like, have to. We're going to get to Nixon's
guys in a while because he plowed through the knives through butter. That accusation is not a fresh
accusation when it comes to attorney general. It's that tension Aggie was talking about at the very
beginning of this episode. There's that tension between you are hired by this person. They support
you through the Senate procedure to get.
Confirmed.
Confirmed. Thank you. To get confirmation. Then somehow you're supposed to be neutral after that.
It's a weird thing to ask somebody. Like, I'd like you to marry me, but I don't want you to really be in
love with me. Like, you know what I mean? It's a weird.
I want you to marry me, but when we do things with your family, I really don't care if you defend me,
huh?
Right.
Of course, your family members are just like, you know, they're the outsider that you brought into our
family. Why aren't you defending us? Now you're stuck in the middle because, your new spouse is just
like, I thought you loved me. Then your family members are like.
I thought you loved me.
Me. You're just like.
I was your first.
At that point in time, you're like, I don't love either one of you right now. I want to be left alone.
I don't know if anybody I'm taking the train home. But I do think sometimes people think this hasn't
come before and like, oh, honey, this happens with a lot of these folks. Especially attorneys general
for some reason. That because of what they do, because of their job, which is to enforce the laws of
the United States.
Yes.
There is that weird gray area of the laws of the United States, according to the president or the laws
of the United States according to legislation or the laws of the United States according to statute.
What am I trying to prosecute here?
It is a weird tension. I mean, the position itself is fraught with conflict.
You couldn't me to be the attorney general.
Because we want the impartial execution or enforcement of law. If there's a set of anti trust laws that
are supposed to apply to business behavior, we want every business to comply.
To have regulation. Including the president's businesses.
This is, or the ones that are favored, that support it in person.
The party in power.
But the problem is, if attorneys general enforced every single federal law, and we were joking about
this off recording, first of all, there is justice. There's not enough personnel on the justice.
There's not enough attorneys and not enough money. Not enough police all 336 million of us. There
just aren't just isn't.
Second of all, the personnel would either die from exhaustion or or quit in math. But then the
American public would be shrunk dramatically in regards to free public because so many of us would
be in cell.
In prison. Because very few people get through their whole lives without breaking a law of some kind.
Did you cross the street at a crosswalk? No, you broke the law. What the attorney general has to do is
decide what level I'm going to go for?
What are my priorities.
How much effort am I going to put into that particular? A perfect example of this is that Al Capone
was brought down on tax charges.
Yes.
Al Capone murdered approximately 800,000 give or take. He didn't go down for murder at all.
Yes.
He went down for tax evasion because that's what they could get him for. That's a case they could
prove. Like, that's what Attorney General has they have to look at the thing and say, I can't prove X, Y,
or Z, but I can prove Q, A, and L, so that's what we're going to going to put. That takes a lot of effort
to do that. That's a lot of time and manpower and intellectual power to figure that out.
The other thing to take note of is, and I'm going to push back slightly on the criticism of Gonzalez as
being Bush's yes person. Because scholars are still debating his torture memo and the other memos
he wrote that if you will, gave legal and constitutional cover to, for instance, enhanced interrogation,
the secret surveillance program, which actually arose before he became attorney general. But the
White House Counsel's office were like, there is some play in the law. We're still debating a lot of that
stuff. It's not as though, lawyers in the legal community and legal scholars are just like, oh the Bush
administration was completely wrong. No, we're still debating this stuff. If it was crystal clear, then
why are we still debating it? If it was unclear then, it's still unclear today.
One could argue from the torture memos, do the means justify the end? Or does the end justify the
means. There were people who said, Yes, yes, American lives saved justifies whatever you do to get
the information to save American lives. All of this is a risk management operation. What's the worst
thing that's going to happen here? What's the best thing that's going to happen here? What's the
ideal outcome and what can I live with?
Yes. Okay. It's like Nia, I have friends who for years have worked in the EPA. They tell me that we
have the technology to have even better air quality, better water quality, et cetera.
Cars that go much further miles per gallon.
I respond, I'm like, so what are the costs? They're like, but you can't put a cost on clean air. I said, but
yes, we have to. Because people are going to want to know how much am I going to have to pay?
What are my taxes going to do? In order to pay to clean the air that way.
Are you willing to have the conversation. Because they're almost as bad as the people on the other
side who are like, I never want to pay for any of this. I don't care if I go ahead and die 15 years earlier
because of poor air quality. I'm like, but what if you only had to go ahead and pay a little bit extra or
drive a different car than the one you currently have? You're not willing to have that conversation. It
does come down to risk management and cost benefit analysis.But people are unwilling to go ahead
and have this conversation. I would have loved to had the Bush administration say to Congress,
without going into all the explicit details, this is why we think enhanced interrogation is the route to
go. Why? But we never had that conversation. We end up finding out about it only after people suffer
from enhanced interrogation. The allegations become public, and then the government has to spend a
whole bunch of time saying, well, we did think about this. We have these legal memos, and I'm like, it
would have been nice if you had presented it to the public and said, here are have choices.
Public debate. Let's have a public debate. What are we willing to do in order to whatever. What are we
not willing to do? Where's the line? What are we? The argument on the other side of that is that's why
you hire government. Yeah. Is that you don't have to have the hard conversations and do those kinds
and do that work. That comes back to trust. And right now, trust in American government is at I think
the lowest it's ever been. But that's not Donald Trump. That's been true for a while now. That has
been happening for several presidents.
Most scholars point to Vietnam War, Watergate, Nixon's resignation.
As it slide into the government is just a bunch of criminals, and we shouldn't.
Eventually it's spilled over to Congress as we mentioned in a previous podcast.
Now it's sucking in the court.
Courts?
Now it's sucking in the court. Now the court is part of the criminal conspiracy, and you're like okay.
Yes. Your name is as good as mud, 'cause you're all hanging out with a bunch of crooks.
You're not yourself you know everybody else is a crook and you're not doing anything about it. That's
the argument.
You're guilty by association. Really?
You're guilty by association. All 535 people in Congress are criminals. It's like, well, probably not.
But you wouldn't know it. Let's go back to Alberto.
Yes, because we've gotten a little far away. There he is. He's writing these memos. He's being the
office counsel. Then we'll start to go, murmur Supreme Court, Murmur.
Well, before they start considering him for the Supreme Court, okay? In 2004, we have another
presidential election. Bush wins re election against John Carey. Almost immediately afterwards,
Attorney General John Ashcroft decides to resign. Not a big shock. Ashcroft suffered from some
serious health issues during the first Bush term.
Yes.
Bush was considered a number of people. Interestingly enough, Alberto Gonzales was not the fan
favored by hardcore conservatives in the Republican Party. They thought he was too much of a
moderate compared to Ashcroft.
It's the guy who supported Enhanced interrogation. He's too much of a softy. I can tell you something
about the government or the Republicans at the time.
Mind you, many in the public did not know that Alberto Gonzales authored the torture memos. They
were drafted by others, but they didn't know that we had torture memos floating around.
The Office of Counsel regularly signs things with an individual's name. It comes out from the Office of
Counsel, they hardly ever say Loki wrote this memo. Orne wrote this memo so let's go after that
person.
The reason why Gonzales was considered too much of a moderate was that he was not seen as
publicly opposing abortion or affirmative action, which at that time, and I would even argue today, is
like acts of Shibboleth in the Republican Party. If you got to come out and say, you oppose abortion
and you oppose affirmative action because otherwise, you're not a faithful conservative.
You're a Rhino. You're Republican in name only.
But nevertheless, a I've read a number of articles. Gonzales has never said he was pro choice. He has
said he was then and remains publicly opposed to racial quotas, which immediately just sent
Democratic senators on fire. I was just like, Okay.
Well, he shares a similar viewpoint with Justice Thomas, I think about that, which is people should be
judged based on the merit of their work.
Yes.
That's easy to say when you're on the Supreme Court or in the highest levels of government. There
are discussions to be had about that, but we shall not have them here.
But interestingly enough, he did gain some support in Democratic Party circles, in part, based on his
ethnic background, former Democratic Housing and Urban Development secretary, Henry Cisneros
and Colorado Democratic Senator Ken Salazar both supported his nomination. He was approved in
February of 2005. It was largely on party lines. He was confirmed 60 to 36, 54 Republicans, six
Democrats supported his nomination. Only one Republican voted against him. So one Republican
didn't vote at all.
Wasn't this in some ways perceived as this is prepping him to be on the Supreme Court? There's a
letter to attorneys general, that's one of the routes that they can take is to use that position to climb
higher in the legal profession?
Yes. Some prominent Supreme Court justices were previous attorneys general. Frank Murphy was,
Robert Jackson, Harlan Fisk Stone. They all ended up getting on the Supreme Court. That was
considered one of the potential pathways for you to get on the Supreme Court. Today, you got to be a
former federal court judge, let's face it. If you're not a former federal court judge, good luck, your
name getting any consideration from presidents of either political party.
That's a moving up in the ranks kind of a thing. You serve at a district level, then you serve at a circuit
court level, you serve through all these levels so that shows more and more judicial experience and
responsibility and that kind of stuff.
There is so much more we could cover about Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. Nia, if you don't
have a problem, I'm going to pick something that many probably don't remember, but we should
probably pay a little bit of attention to, and that is the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program.
That's the one you're going to choose?
Secret surveillance.
I would choose something else.
When he was legal counsel, the Justice Department and the FBI used a provision of the Patriot Act to
increase the amount of surveillance the government was doing on the American public. Basically,
what they would do is there's a feature of the Patriot Act known as a national security letter. The
federal government would submit this letter requesting broad aggregate data from a private sector
company. Let's just say one of the issues was with the 911 attacks, how did those 18 individuals.
Nineteen individuals.
Okay, finance their operation? What they would do with the National Security letter is ask banks of
suspected terrorist or terrorist sympathizers to turn over their aggregate data so they could look for
banking transactions that mimicked the bank transactions of the 19 terrorists responsible for the 911
attacks. That way they could establish, if you will, software models that could then pick up individuals
who should be surveilled.
Here recently, you all may have heard about prediction modeling and how grumpy it's making people
because police are using that. This is that but 20 years ago. It's the idea that if I can look at enough of
your data, I can decide whether you are doing something illegal, by the way money moves in and out
of your world.
Yes. The New York Times in 2005 report on this, if you will, NSA eavesdropping on US citizens without
warrants because again, all they used were national security letters. Now, businesses could reject
them, but businesses were concerned post 911 that if they rejected a national security letter request
that the Bush administration might make it public that certain American corporations weren't all that
concerned about national security after 911.
There's that or so you don't turn it over. Guy turns out to be a terrorist. He does something. Then it
comes out later that you didn't give the feds information that could have potentially stopped that.
Either way, companies are like, Oh, man, we cannot win this. This is Silla and Charybdis. We are
standing literally between the rock and the hard place, what do we do? They almost always caved it
over.
The New York Times reports on the secret surveillance program that the Bush administration was
using again, generated by just huge amounts of data that were turned over because of these national
security letters.
There's a sound effect for the New York Times reporting. This is alarming. You should be concerned
about this amount of data going to who knows where, for who knows what reason that has not been
made clear to a judge anywhere other than getting this letter.
Gonzales is now Attorney General. Gonzales threatens to prosecute the New York Times journalists
who reported this because their report quoted in some stories, verbatim from classified documents.
He says, This violates the Espionage Act of 1917, which the Supreme Court in 1919 in the Schenk
case said was constitutional.
I don't know if you already lose when you start trying to stand on the neck of the press. I don't know.
The other part of that is, should the New York Times have been publishing classified information? The
answer to that is probably no. I don't know. That was a tough case.
The Office of Personal Responsibility in the Justice Department, then begins an investigation of Alberto
Gonzales, whether or not he should have been threatening the New York Times with espionage
prosecution and then expands its investigation to take a look at the torture memos. Alberto Gonzales
defense of Vice President Dick Cheney and his secretive energy task force, et cetera.
Dick Cheney was like, Hey, I want to talk to energy people because I'm getting ready to write an
energy policy. The corporations in the room are going to, of course, encourage a policy that helps
their corporation, that's questionable to me. The whole, "You know who I should talk to about this
thing." The people who want to make money off of it. I don't know. I have feelings about that.
Well, interestingly enough, the case goes the whole way to the US Supreme Court, and the Supreme
Court ruled in favor of Vice President Cheney.
That he was free to talk to whoever he wanted to in the private industry about, I don't know.
Which as the Supreme Court pointed out, if we start forcing vice presidents and presidents to make
public all of their private conversations before they draft policy initiatives, presidents and vice
presidents will be less likely to go ahead and consult with those who might actually be affected by
those policies.
It's that push pull that you're always talking about in government of how do you walk that line
between being in bed with people who will write policy for their favor and make lots of money and not
care about the public verses but these are the experts in the field and they know what's going on.
While this is going on, and mind you, this is the Office of Personal Responsibility within his own Justice
Department. It's conducting an investigation of the board.
This is your internal affairs.
While all this is going on, he's trying to be the Attorney General of the United States. As Nia alluded to
a few moments ago, he was also being considered in 2005 to be a justice on the United States
Supreme Court. Because again, for our younger listeners, there were two vacancies that occurred on
the Supreme Court in 2005. Sandra Day O'Connor announced she was going to retire so she could
take care of her ailing husband. Then a few months later, Chief Justice Rehnquist dies from
esophageal cancer. Now there's two vacancies. The scuttle butt was well, Alberto Gonzales is
personally, supported by the president and he's had a series of important legal positions, et cetera.
This is just really remarkable. Alberto Gonzales had to be thinking, I can't win here. The Democrats
were like, under no circumstances should this guy become a Supreme Court justice? He authored the
torture memos.
He's a yes man. He's totally in bed with Bush. He's going to do whatever Bush wants.
He's an apologist for secret surveillance of American citizens. Then conservatives were like, under no
circumstances can he be nominated.
He's too moderate.
Moderate on abortion, on affirmative action, et cetera.
We can't trust him to do the hard thing.
Yes.
Sound familiar?
Again, if you think some of the craziness we're seeing in the current Trump administration is brand
new, it ain't. It's not. Eventually, in August of 2007, Gonzales submits his resignation as attorney
general. He thanks the president for the opportunity, and he does not state any reasons for his
resignation or his future plans. Bush goes ahead and thanks him for his service, work in Texas, work
in the government.
There was crappiness about that OPR because they weren't given clearances to look at certain things.
Yes.
Bush was accused of protecting Gonzales and Gonzales was accused of protecting Bush. There was
some sleight of hand there. What a lot of it came down to was they didn't have the security clearance
to look at certain things. The security environment in the early 2000s was strained. It was very
strained because they were taken under enormous pressure. They were blamed for 911, and they
were under enormous pressure for not knowing and not understanding what was going on. There's
this weird whole thing with intelligence. I think that and the firings of the attorneys, the midnight
slaughter. It wasn't a midnight slaughter, but he fired a whole bunch of US attorneys and didn't give a
reason. His reasons were reasons like 'cause I don't like your hair, he give very strange.
Well, he didn't even give reasons. Here's the thing. This has become an issue with the Trump
administration. Again, this is not brand new folks. Per federal law, US attorneys, working for the
federal government across the United States are picked by the president. It is customary.
Serve at the pleasure of the president.
Pleasure the president. Which means anybody who works in the West Wing of the White House, they
can be terminated without cause.
Immediately. There is no I have to give you some three month warning, no.
Now, historically, the way presidents have generated goodwill among US senators is that, and this is
part of senatorial courtesy. Hey, there's a vacant US attorney position in your state. Do you have
some recommendations? Or I'm thinking about firing or asking for the resignation of the current US
attorney. Will you have any problems with me doing so?
Because a person may say, no, please don't. This person, they're really good for us, or they're on our
side or whatever argument they make and they might get left in place. But there's also when
presidents turnover, there tends to be turnover in the government, there tends to be, new sheriff in
town, new US attorney general in town, which means that there may be shake ups and movements in
the state attorneys general.
These occurred after Bush's re-election win, and what got reported, though Gonzales never confirmed
nor denied, was that the Bush administration determined that there were a bunch of US attorneys
who were unwilling to be as aggressive in prosecuting the war on terror. Gonzales said, Well, Mr.
President, legally we don't have to consult or make public why. Gonzales took one for the team. He
went ahead and fired a bunch of them. I read a bunch of stories on this, Nia, a bunch of newspapers
reported the big complaint in the White House, but particularly among Vice President Cheney's staff
was we had a bunch of US attorneys who were weak and weren't willing to go after aggressive
prosecution of the global war on terrorism. Not only we fighting this overseas, we need to be fighting
it domestically in our courts. If they're not willing to do so, let's get rid of them. Gonzales said, Well,
according to law, we can, and he did. Then he got blasted. He got blasted. Again, the funny thing is,
when Gonzales resigned, I think this is so quaint, three different senators, two Democrats, one
Republican, all went ahead and said the resignation was entirely attributable to the excessive
politicizing of the Attorney General's office by Gonzales, whose credibility with Congress they asserted
was non existent. I'm like, God, that sounds so familiar.
Take that phrase up and apply it to almost any attorney general in modern time. That's what they
would say about Pam Bondi. That's what they say about Eric Holder.
Hold on, they eventually said it about Merrick Garland.
Who is made out of the most vanilla pudding that is on the earth and yet somehow he's this guy. It's
because if you're not all the way on my side, you're the enemy.
[inaudible] the office of Attorney General.
What's unfortunate about that is there is no more McCain Feingold, there is no more of that.
Working across partisan lines.
They'd rather chew through a limb than be seen to be friends with somebody. What happened after? I
lost track of Alberto Gonzales, I have to admit. I have this bad habit of when you leave the
government, I tend to forget you exist because at that point, I'm not hearing about you on a regular
basis and you're not making me irritated on a regular basis. I don't keep you in my brain.
Out of sight, out of mind.
What happened to him?
Well, depending on your perspective of his tenure as White House Counsel and Attorney General,
either got what he deserved or man, that's a shame. I stopped counting. He was investigated at least
a half a dozen times by various state, federal, and international offices. Nia, the International Criminal
Court opened an investigation of Alberto Gonzales.
Really?
Yes, for his actions in the Bush 43 administration. Nia, he was investigated so many times that his
friends created a legal defense fund, much like what President Bill Clinton had to do to cover all his
various legal fees. I kid you not.
That's too bad. What you're saying is it didn't end for him, it just went on and on.
Then if that wasn't bad enough, he struggled to find work after his resignation. For easily two-and-ahalf
years, no law firm, no school, no government jurisdiction wanted to hire him. He was radioactive.
Eventually, he got a part time job at Texas Tech University, and then eventually, he became the law
school dean at Belmont University, which is a small private school in Nashville, Tennessee.
That's where he is now?
Yeah.
We shouldn't say past tense in the sense that Alberto Gonzales is still alive.
Yes, he is.
He's still with us. But that's a sad trajectory of the career of somebody who was on a rocket ship only
going up for a while there.
I got to wonder how many times has he thought about or had regrets about leaving private practice
and going to work in the Governor Bush administration in Texas. Because he was a partner in one of
the most prominent law firms in the United States, Vinson & Elkins is a prominent corporate and
appellate law firm in the United States and he was partner by what? Hi early 40s, he was partner. But
he believed in public service.
Well, and I will say, on a positive note for Alberto Gonzales, there are things about him that Aughie
and I are both like, not so great. But his students at his law schools respect him enormously. But his
breadth of understanding of the law, he's able to explain it. He's able to make it animated and
interesting for them, and that is maybe its own legacy. Maybe that's enough. That is for him to say,
but I'm making the law something that connects with my students in a way that's important and
useful.
The other thing I sometimes say to my students is maybe we can learn from the mistakes and
problems that were encountered by these government officials in earlier times. Maybe we can learn
going forward.
What not to do.
What not to do, but also what probably we should do, because I'm not entirely sure the American
public would not have supported increased surveillance post 911. But the fact that it was done in
secret and then we were told because the New York Times reported classified documents. Again, for
many of us, I might not like a decision the government makes, but if I can understand why the
government did it and it's being transparent, I'm more willing to accept it than if I find out after the
fact.
They were sneaking around, being sneaky. The word sneakiness should not be with the government.
The government should not be sneaky. The government should be transparent and accountable.
Yes.
If you say it's okay to do this, then you need to show us that it works. If you say it's okay to have
these huge amounts of data, you need to show us that you're not doing malicious things with it, that
there's no malicious prosecution from it. Anyway, Alberto Gonzales, he's interesting. He's an
interesting fellow. One of our few names in the stories where you could actually email him if you
wanted to and say hi, which would be a little weird. But you could if you were interested in, is there a
book you'd recommend? Any one book?
No, because what I found is it was pretty hard to find any book.
Completely about him.
Well, was just balanced.
He's such a divisive figure. I see what you're saying. You couldn't read just one. You'd have to read at
least two to get, that makes sense.
Then you go down a rabbit hole, which is what I did and then I'm like, good Lord. I got to be honest
with you, listeners, it took me back to a very formative period of time in my adult life and in my
professional career. I was just like, Wow. I don't know if I really wanted to revisit all of this.
Well, thank you for revisiting it Aughie because I think the attorneys general are interesting and we
do love a series, so you'll be hearing from us with more attorneys general going forward. But thank
you.
Well, thank you, Nia.
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