Looking for scapegoats? Cronies Miers, Gonzales now deemed not qualified.

[ProSense]

Wasn't this a known known?

NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Bush's counsel on spying now under close scrutiny
By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Columnist | December 27, 2005

The current occupants of those jobs are Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and White House counsel Harriet E. Miers. Prior to 2005, Gonzales was White House counsel and John Ashcroft was attorney general.

snip...

Legal advice given to the president in national security matters can hardly be of greater importance. Telling Bush that he lacks the authority to make a particular move could leave the country vulnerable to attack; assuring him that he has the power to override civil liberties could consign innocent suspects to imprisonment, abuse, or disappearance to secret holding areas in other countries.

snip...

By the standards of past attorneys general, Ashcroft and Gonzales were well qualified for the job. Still, neither of them had much occasion to consider the legal limits of presidential power before they took office. Ashcroft taught business law and later became attorney general of Missouri. He then spent 14 years as a governor and senator before becoming Bush's first-term AG. Gonzales was a partner at a corporate law firm before Bush became governor of Texas. He served as a legal adviser to the governor, and was briefly Texas secretary of state and a justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

By the standards of past White House counsels, both Gonzales and Miers were lightly qualified, since neither of them had Washington experience before guiding the president. By contrast, two of President Clinton's White House counsels, Lloyd Cutler and Abner Mikva, were eminent attorneys with decades of experience in assessing the limits of federal power.

During her ill-fated Supreme Court nomination, Miers was castigated by conservatives for her lack of qualifications. But her years as a partner in a corporate firm would have been more useful on the Supreme Court, which hears dozens of business cases a year, than in her current job reviewing the legality of Bush's actions.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/12/27/bushs_counsel_on_spying_now_under_close_scrutiny/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+National+News

[ProSense]

1. This spying incident is going to play out in an interesting way. n/t