Now, this is getting somewhere...

Atlantic columnist Murray Waas writes that sources have told him that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is now saying that President Bush personally directed him to the hospital room of John Ashcroft to get his buy-in on the warrantless surveillance program, and that he also directed Gonzalez to fabricate notes.

You remember the infamous trip, right? Then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez and Chief of Staff Andrew Card went to the hospital bedside of a very ill Attorney General John Ashcroft, to get Ashcroft's buy in on the very-illegal Domestic Surveillance Program. The visit was made public first by James Comey, the acting AG at the time, when he testified before Congress, and was corroborated by FBI Director Robert Mueller. Waas writes that Bush called Ashcroft ahead of time to let him know that Gonzalez and Card were coming.

Waas's retelling of the incident just has to be read again to be fully appreciated:

Gonzales told Ashcroft he had met earlier that day with congressional leaders who, he claimed, supported the continuation of the program without Department of Justice approval, and were determined to find a legislative remedy that would address the legal concerns of Comey and others. Several of the legislative leaders who had been at that meeting with Gonzales and Vice President Cheney say that Gonzales’s account of what transpired was simply not true.

Sullivan posits that Bush was intimately involved in all of the same things as Cheney, including the war crimes.