Justice Department Investigating Gonzales

It took them long enough, but it looks like the Justice Department is finally going to investigate Alberto Gonzales. Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine wrote Senator Leahy a letter, telling him that they are going to look into whether Gonzales lied in his testimony to Congress. Senator Leahy had requested the investigation.

Fine said in his letter to Leahy, "You identified five issues and asked that we investigate whether the statements made by the attorney general were intentionally false, misleading, or inappropriate. The OIG has ongoing investigations that relate to most of the subjects addressed by the attorney general's testimony that you identified."

I'm not going to get too excited about this though. The department is dragging out the investigation on the prosecutor firings, and I expect they'll probably do the same with this one. It's pretty obvious to anyone with ears that Gonzales lied to Congress, but Bush's Justice Department won't want to embarrass him or the Republicans before the upcoming election.

Republicans have never been too good about investigating themselves. I imagine we'll have to wait until a Democrat is in the White House to get a real investigation.