Gonzales vows to stay, fix Justice's image

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In her May testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Goodling described an “uncomfortable” meeting shortly before she left the Justice Department during which Gonzales asked for her recollection of events in the U.S. attorneys scandal, which Congress is investigating.

Her account led to questions of whether Gonzales was coaching Goodling — illegally tampering with a witness in the ongoing inquiry. Gonzales has said he was merely trying to comfort Goodling at an awkward time.

The issue of the meeting was Topic A among a list of a dozen questions that Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy sent Gonzales last week. Leahy also needled Gonzales on his April 17 appearance in front of the same panel, during which the attorney general declined to answer questions at least 60 times, citing a faulty memory or simply saying he didn’t know the answers.

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“I would like to avoid a repeat of that performance,” Leahy wrote in the July 17 letter.

A voter fraud case in Missouri, FBI violations in terror and spy investigations and the role that outgoing Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty played in the prosecutor firings also are topics on senators’ agenda for the hearing.

Gonzales also is expected to be asked about his participation, as White House counsel at the time, in a March 2004 hospital room confrontation with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft over whether the government’s domestic spying program was legal. Gonzales was in front of the House Intelligence Committee in a private hearing last week to discuss that meeting, during which he attempted to get an ailing Ashcroft to approve the program over the Justice Department’s objections. Gonzales was named attorney general less than a year later.

Also Monday, the House Judiciary Committee said that it would vote Wednesday on contempt citations for former White House counsel Harriet Miers and White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten, who have refused to comply with subpoenas seeking their testimony in the U.S. attorney investigation.