In anticipation of his make-or-break testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday regarding his role in the partisan purge of U.S. attorneys, embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took to the pages of the Washington Post to save his neck. But by contradicting his own March 6th USA Today op-ed, Gonzales may have simply tightened the noose.
In his April 15 Washington Post piece ("Nothing Improper"), Gonzales resorts to the dual defenses of revisionist history and hazy memory. President Bush's Attorney General summarized his case:

"To be clear: I directed my then-deputy chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to initiate this process; fully knew that it was occurring; and approved the final recommendations. Sampson periodically updated me on the review. As I recall, his updates were brief, relatively few in number and focused primarily on the review process.
During those conversations, to my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign."

Sadly for the soon-to-be former Attorney General, that statement directly contradicts his primary assertion from his on March 6th screed in USA Today. He must have made "decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign", because as Gonzales wrote then, "they simply lost my confidence."

"While I am grateful for the public service of these seven U.S. attorneys, they simply lost my confidence. I hope that this episode ultimately will be recognized for what it is: an overblown personnel matter."

Gonzales' April 15 op-ed, of course, also contradicts public statements he made previously. On March 30, Gonzales declared "I don't recall being involved in deliberations involving the question of whether or not a U.S. attorney should or should not be asked to resign." Two weeks later, the Attorney General apparently did recall such discussions, a point his one-time chief-of-staff Kyle Sampson made during his Congressional testimony on March 29, 2007. "I don't think," Sampson testified, "the attorney general's statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate."
As Attorney General Gonzales nears his date with destiny on Tuesday, he must walk a tightrope between self-preservation and perjury. As I wrote previously, Gonzales almost certainly lied under oath during his January 18th testimony. There, he claimed he would neither change a U.S. attorney to impact an ongoing investigation nor use the infamous Patriot Act provision to skirt Senate confirmation of his replacements. Emails subsequently released by the DOJ showed otherwise. (For the details, see "The Top 10 Reasons Gonzales Must Go.")
Time will tell if Alberto Gonzales lies to Congress this week. But in the pages of two of America's most prominent newspapers, he already has.
(For the latest news, email archives, document dumps and other essential materials in the Bush DOJ U.S. attorneys purge, visit the Perrspectives U.S. Attorneys Scandal Documents Center.)
UPDATE: The DOJ has posted the transcript of Gonzales' prepared statement for his Tuesday testimony. It is clear that Gonzales' piece in today's Washington Post was extracted almost verbatim from it. Gonzales' statement also makes clear that his primary - and disturbing - line of defense will be a hazy memory and his own supposedly marginal role in the process of sacking the U.S. attorneys.