Embattled US Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday it is up to President George W. Bush whether he remains in the administration and said he wants to stay and explain to Congress the circumstances surrounding the firings of eight US attorneys.
Amid an escalating political row and calls from some Democrats for his resignation, Gonzales said: "I work for the American people and serve at the pleasure of the president," adding that he'd done a good job.
"I think you can look at the record of the department in terms of what we've done... going after child predators, public corruption cases," he said on NBC's Today show. "I think our record is outstanding."
The dispute over the prosecutors has become the latest clash between Bush's Republican Party and the newly empowered Democratic majority in Congress. Democrats, who have long accused Republicans of running roughshod over opponents, have portrayed the firings as part of a campaign of intimidation and obstruction by the Bush administration and Republican lawmakers.
Gonzales acknowledged, as he had on Tuesday, that mistakes were made in the handling of the US attorney firings and said he wanted to remain in the job to make things right with Congress.
Several Democrats have called for Gonzales' resignation, among them presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.
The firestorm of criticism has erupted in the wake of the disclosure of e-mails within the administration which showed that Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, had discussed the possible firings of US attorneys in early 2005 with then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers.
Gonzales accepted Sampson's resignation this week; Miers had left the administration earlier this year.
It was the second time in as many weeks that Gonzales came under withering criticism on Capitol Hill. Last week, he and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller admitted that the FBI had improperly, and at times illegally, used the USA Patriot Act to secretly pry out personal information about Americans in terrorism investigations.
Gonzales, himself a former White House counsel, has been friends with Bush for years, going back to when he served as Bush's secretary of state in Texas. Bush retains full confidence in the attorney-general, spokesman Dan Bartlett, traveling with Bush in Mexico, said Wednesday.
(China Daily via agencies March 15, 2007)
