But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the forgotten
man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much a window into the
White House's panic and stonewalling as its haste to put forward the man he did.
When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why
did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend
Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the
right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva
Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real
fear.

As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice
Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the
outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29,
2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff
that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This
12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since
the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to
recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine
this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor
knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said
Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first
revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would
have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the
thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months.

Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House
casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the early
timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory scraps, two damning
story lines emerge and both have legs.

On CBS’s Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer noted that this time gap would
have “give[n] people time to shred documents and do any number of things.”
Gonzales argued that he asked for and received permission from the Justice
Department to wait until the next morning to order White House staff to preserve
all documents regarding their contacts with journalists about Valerie Plame. But
he did tell one person the night before…

SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you the obvious question, Mr. Attorney
General. Did you tell anybody at the White House, get ready for this, here it
comes?

GONZALES: I, I told one person, ah, in, in the White House of, of the
notification, and, and —

SCHIEFFER: Who?

GONZALES: and immediately — ah, I told the chief of staff. And immediately
the next morning, I told the President and, shortly thereafter, there was a notification sent out to all the members of the White House staff.

Check out the video of this at Crooks and Liars. So the one person who knew that an investigation was underway was Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who also happened to be aboard Air Force One in July 2003 with Ari Fleischer, Colin Powell, and the top
secret State Department document that contained the identity of Valerie Wilson. So, did Card tell Rove or Libby or anyone for that matter the night before Alberto
Gonzales sent out the email to staff that they would soon be asked to preserve
all documents?