WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) has chosen White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, a Texas confidant and one of the most prominent Hispanics in the administration, to succeed Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites), sources close to the White House said Wednesday.
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Ashcroft announced his resignation on Tuesday, along with Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a Texas friend of the president's.
After a National Security Council meeting, Bush was sitting down Wednesday with Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites), another figure being closely watched for signs of whether he will stay or go. Powell has been largely noncommital when asked about his plans.
Gonzales, 49, has long been rumored as a leading candidate for a Supreme Court vacancy if one develops. Speculation increased after Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist announced he has thyroid cancer.
Gonzales' career has been linked with Bush for at least a decade, serving as general counsel when Bush was governor of Texas, and then as secretary of state and as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court.
Gonzales has been at the center of developing Bush's positions on balancing civil liberties with waging the war on terrorism ? opening the White House counsel to the same line of criticism that has dogged Ashcroft.
For instance, Gonzales publicly defended the administration's policy ? essentially repudiated by the Supreme Court and now being fought out in the lower courts ? of detaining certain terrorism suspects for extended periods without access to lawyers or courts.
He also wrote a controversial February 2002 memo in which Bush claimed the right to waive anti-torture law and international treaties providing protections to prisoners of war. That position drew fire from human rights groups, which said it helped led to the type of abuses uncovered in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Some conservatives also have quietly questioned Gonzales' credentials on core social issues. And he once was a partner in a Houston law firm which represented the scandal-ridden energy giant Enron.
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