TPM reports that Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) will vote no on the AG nomination of Michael Mukasey.

Will Mukasey be defeated in committee? Depends I think on Schumer and Feinstein. Frankly, I have little confidence they will vote against Mukasey. And if they do and Mukasey is defeated in committee? What then? Normally, that would be that. But Harry Reid has been pretty lousy lately so it is possible he will give Mukasey a floor vote where he would almost certainly be confirmed.

Congrats to long-time bachelor and Scooter Libby prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. He's getting married.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, 46, the U.S. attorney in Chicago since September 2001, plans to marry Jennifer Letzkus, 34, a teacher, spokesman Randall Samborn confirmed.

Samborn said the couple plan a "small private wedding" but declined to say exactly when or where. He also would not provide Letzkus's hometown.

I think this lawsuit is over the top.

A one year old falls in the family pool. The family calls 911.

The child, Joey Cosmillo, fell into the family pool in January. He was resuscitated but suffered brain damage and can't walk, talk or swallow. He lives in a nursing home and eats and breathes through tubes.

A cop responds to the 911 call and slips and falls due to a puddle of water inside the home.

Police Sgt. Andrea Eichhorn alleges the boy's family left a puddle of water on the floor, causing her fall during the rescue effort. She broke her knee and missed two months of work.

Eichhorn's attorney, David Heil, said she now has persistent knee pain and will likely develop arthritis. He said city benefits paid by workers' compensation and some disability checks helped with medical bills, but it wasn't enough.

More...

Jack Balkin writes:

The twisting of law by the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales is far worse than Gonzales' misleading testimony in front of Congress about the U.S. Attorney scandal. That scandal dominated the headlines for weeks. This one deserves far more searching press scrutiny. Despite the fact that Congress repeatedly passed legislation stating that it was illegal for U.S. personnel to engage in torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, the Justice Department repeatedly redefined the terms of these prohibitions so that the CIA could keep doing exactly what the Justice Department had authorized to do before. Gonzales treated all of these laws as if they made no difference at all, as if they were just pieces of paper. . . . MORE

Has there ever been a more disgraceful Attorney General than Alberto Gonzales? Has there ever been a more disgraceful Administration than the Bush Administration? No:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

The nation may never recover from the damage done by these scoundrels.

A U.S. District Court Judge in New Hampshire shows his sense of humor, responding to an inmate's lawsuit by writing in verse, a la Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.

The backdrop: New Hampshire state inmate Charles Jay Wolff doesn't like eggs. When the state prison kept providing them to him, he filed a lawsuit. Along with the lawsuit, he mailed a hard-boiled egg to the Judge.

The Judge's response:

"I do not like eggs in the file," Muirhead wrote. "I do not like them in any style. I will not take them fried or boiled. I will not take them poached or broiled. I will not take them soft or scrambled / Despite an argument well-rambled."

The verse grew heated, exclamation marks were injected, and the egg was ordered destroyed.

"No fan I am / Of the egg at hand. Destroy that egg! Today! Today! Today I say! Without delay!"

Here's the full text (verse) of the Judge's reply.

Good news in the academic freedom department. Liberal Law Prof Erwin Chemerinsky has been rehired to be the dean of the University of California's (Irvine)law school.

Via the AP:

The new Donald Bren School of Law will be the first new public law school in California in 40 years and is expected to welcome its first class in 2009.

Chemerinsky taught for 21 years at the University of Southern California law school before moving to Duke University in 2004. In April 2005, Legal Affairs magazine named him one of the top 20 legal thinkers in America.

AP reports:

President Bush has settled on Michael B. Mukasey, a retired federal judge from New York, to replace Alberto Gonzales as attorney general and will announce his selection Monday, a person familiar with the president's decision said Sunday evening.
Mukasey, who has handled terrorist cases in the U.S. legal system for more than a decade, would become the nation's top law enforcement officer if confirmed by the Senate. Mukasey has the support of some key Democrats, and it appeared Bush was trying to avoid a bruising confirmation battle.

See Jeralyn's detailed reporting on Mukasey.

Federal Times is a publication geared to federal executives and managers. It has an interesting article this week on Gonzales' resignation and the politicization of the U.S. Attorney's offices under Republican reign.

A February study by professors at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and Illinois State University found that since President Bush took office, U.S. attorneys have investigated or indicted four times as many elected Democratic officials as Republicans.

Joseph Rich, who was chief of the voting section in Justice’s Civil Rights Division from 1999 to 2005, published a column in the Los Angeles Times in March that said his office had been politicized. He said his superiors told him to alter performance evaluations to favor attorneys who supported the administration and punish those who disagreed with the White House.

Rich said that no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of black or Native American voters between 2001 and 2006 and that his office was ordered to focus on voting fraud cases instead. This crushed morale in his section, Rich said, and drove more than half of the voting office’s attorneys to go to other offices or leave the department since 2005.

The list of departing DOJ officials so far:

Update (TL): Gonzales will make a statement at 10:30 am ET, I'll live blog it in a new thread. Bush is also expected to make a statement, and CNN says he will not be naming a replacement today. CNN says Chertoff is the favorite for ultimate replacement, also naming Paul Clement.

*****

He finally did something right:

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.

I'm sure J. and TChris will have thoughts later.

Via Benen, on Hardball yesterday, Ezra Klein had this exchange with Tweety and GOP operative Karen Hanratty:

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about this more tricky question of Albert Gonzales. The president said the guy has done nothing wrong. Point to something he has done, Ezra. Because either that or the president is right completely. Point to something he did wrong.

KLEIN: Aside from the firing of the prosecutors?

MATTHEWS: No, what did he do wrong?

HANRETTY: That wasn’t wrong.

KLEIN: Well, there you go.

MATTHEWS: What crime did he commit? (CROSSTALK)

KLEIN: I’m not going to speak on whether or not he committed a crime, I’m not a lawyer. But what he did wrong was fire prosecutors for political reasons. I think we can agree on whether that is an ethical violation.

MATTHEWS: And that has never been done before?

HANRETTY: That is not illegal…. Yes, you absolutely can fire someone midterm for political reasons. It is not against the law.

More.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has responded in writing regarding the apparent discrepancies in his testimony regarding the dispute in the Bush Administration over intelligence activities. My review of the letter leads me to the conclusion that Gonzales has largely abandoned his story about the supposed limited nature of the dispute. It seems entirely different from his previous testimony, though he does weakly cling to the notion that the discrepancies were a result of the different understanding of the term TSP. See for yourself and tell me what you think. Senator Leahy was not impressed:

The Attorney General’s legalistic explanation of his misleading testimony under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week is not what one should expect from the top law enforcement officer of the United States. It is time for full candor to enforce the law and promote justice, rather than word parsing.
“The Attorney General has until the end of this week to correct and supplement his testimony. I hope he will take that opportunity to clarify the many issues on which he appears not to have been forthcoming and to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee and the American people the whole truth.”

That seems a fair request in light of this letter from Gonzales. What does it all mean? I think a non-confrontational approach is what the Bush Administration has chosen. I think Gonzo will, in essence, recant his testimony.