Alberto Gonzales, who served as White House counsel and attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris in a POLITICO Magazine op-ed published Thursday morning.
“Though I’m a Republican, I’ve decided to support Kamala Harris for president,” Gonzales wrote.
“Power is intoxicating and based on Trump’s rhetoric and conduct it appears unlikely that he would respect the power of the presidency in all instances; rather, he would abuse it for personal and political gain, and not on behalf of the American people.”
REUTERS/Jim Bourg
Gonzales went on to warn that former President Donald Trump is “perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of the law in a generation.”
Gonzales joins Dick Cheney, another former top Bush administration official, to publicly announce that they would not be backing the Republican nominee and would instead pull the lever for a Democrat in November.
In a statement released last Friday, Cheney, who served as Bush’s vice president for his two terms in office, said “there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” His daughter, Liz Cheney, has become one of the harshest critics of Trump among Republicans.
Gonzales and Cheney were both widely reviled by liberals and Democrats during the Bush years, particularly over their roles in the domestic and foreign responses to 9/11.
Gonzales, acting as Bush’s top White House lawyer, signed an infamous memo in 2002 arguing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to either al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees, and that those rules were “quaint” and “obsolete” in dealing with the War on Terror.
“In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments,” the memo said.
The Washington Post later reported that the memo, which had Gonzales’ name signed to it, was drafted by Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington.
As White House counsel, Gonzales also requested legal opinions from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) regarding the legality of using certain interrogation methods on suspected terrorists. These opinions were partly shaped by his concern for protecting U.S. personnel from legal liability for using aggressive techniques that would later be widely equated with torture.
One of the most controversial documents was the August 1, 2002 memo, often referred to as the Bybee Memo (written by OLC’s Jay Bybee, with significant input from another top Bush official, John Yoo). It argued that torture was defined in extremely narrow terms and that certain interrogation techniques that might otherwise be considered torture could be legally justified.
Gonzales was also involved in the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program that became highly controversial during his tenure as White House Counsel and later as attorney general. He was a fierce defender of the USA PATRIOT ACT signed into law after 9/11, which was criticized for being used to spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant.
As for Cheney, he is widely considered to be the architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq that killed some 7,000 American troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. As recently as 2018, Cheney said he still believed sending the military into Iraq was the “right thing to do.”
In response to his endorsement of Harris, Trump called him an “irrelevant RINO.”
The Republican nominee has not yet responded to Gonzales’ op-ed supporting his opponent.
