James Comey - former acting Director of the Deparment of Justice - a reluctant honest man.

“I prepared a letter of resignation, intending to resign the next day, Friday, March the 12th,” Comey said. “I believed that I couldn’t - I couldn’t stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis. I just simply couldn’t stay.”

    Comey added that FBI Director Robert Mueller was prepared to resign in protest, as well as were other officials in the Justice Department. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that shortly thereafter he spoke to President Bush “in his study and we had a one-on-one meeting for about 15 minutes - again, which I will not go into the substance of. It was a very full exchange.”

    The revelations Tuesday, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, are just another example of the politicization of the Justice Department under the leadership of Gonzales.

    In an interview with Truthout following Comey’s testimony, Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general, said he believed Gonzales and the other White House officials had behaved like “thugs.”

    ”This gives you an understanding of what Gonzales thinks about the Department of Justice,” said Heymann, now a law professor at Harvard University. “You had the most complete form of legal deliberation over the NSA spying issue; hours of discussion between FBI, DOJ, the solicitor general, and through this process, the DOJ decides that the program is not legal. To do this by using a ploy - which couldn’t possibly amount to a sound legal judgment, and in effect creating a war, with the Justice Department rallying its forces to uphold the law - the White House officials, led by Gonzales and Card, were behaving like thugs.”