Questions. Like you, I have questions. And, as it happened, Alberto Gonzales, the man with many of the answers, was in town.

How lucky could I get?

So, I rushed over to the U.S. attorney's office, where the attorney general was leading a roundtable discussion on the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet. I had notebook and tape recorder in hand, ready to fire away - once I got past the bomb-sniffing dog, anyway.

Actually, I knew better. I had already learned that the notebook and tape recorder were not needed. The attorney general, we had been informed, would not be taking any questions - not on child exploitation, not on fired U.S. attorneys, not on bomb-sniffing dogs, not on anything else.

In other words, there would be no bombshells.

In other words, it could be said that Gonzales was exploiting the child-exploitation roundtable in order to divert attention from, well, you know.

In other words, it could also be said that Gonzales, who is traveling all week, is facing his problem back in D.C. by invoking that well-known Animal House prescription for bad news: Road trip!

Ah, it's another beautiful day in George Bush's America, where, as I may have mentioned before, we're all on a need-to-know basis - unless, of course, you find the news in the administration's Friday afternoon e-mail dump.

The big news Monday was that one of Gonzales' deputies has refused to testify before the Senate Justice Committee about the eight fired prosecutors. Monica Goodling, White House liaison for the Justice Department, says she will take the Fifth Amendment instead.

Now, there's a question waiting to be asked of Gonzales: Why would Goodling have to worry about self-incrimination?

Or maybe your question is the one best raised by Andrew Cohen on his washingtonpost.com blog, on what he called Gonzales' "I Did Not Have Sex With That Woman" moment.

I don't want to disappoint anyone, but he wasn't actually referring to sex. He was referring to Gonzales' news conference in which he said he knew next to nothing about the firings and that if we wanted to blame someone, why not his former assistant Kyle Sampson, who had conveniently resigned.

Here's the money quote from Gonzales - "I was not involved in the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on."

And then comes the e-mail dump, in which it turns out that Gonzales had an hourlong meeting about firing the prosecutors.

Question: Mr. Attorney General, have you considered investigating this vast problem with Bushian- onset amnesia? Or maybe that's a problem for the surgeon general.

Gonzales is scheduled to testify before Congress on April 17. He'll be greeted by a line of politicians suggesting that he resign. He's already gotten the dreaded vote of confidence from the president.

The funny thing is - in this case - that Bush has every right to fire a U.S. attorney. But the trouble came when it was time to try to justify the rare midterm firings - which seemed to be political. Some of the e-mails, in fact, reveal Justice officials trying to find good explanations for the dismissals. Some of the explanations were, uh, tortured, although probably not violations of any of the quainter Geneva Conventions.

And then we learned that one U.S. attorney had been pressured by New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson and that another had indicted Duke Cunningham and that another had discounted voter fraud allegations in a Washington state election. And you get the idea.

Suddenly, the e-mail explanation about "weak performers" vs. "loyal Bushies" made perfect sense.

When the roundtable was over, no news had been made, although there was some smirking when Gonzales had said that the danger to girls putting a personal post on the Internet was that "you can never get it back." The cameras moved toward Gonzales, and Gonzales moved quickly toward the back door. I wondered if he was thinking about the Geneva Conventions then.

When I got back to the office, there was another story. And another question.

Check out Jane Mayer's story in last week's New Yorker. She reached Tim Griffin, a new U.S. attorney who happened to work for Rove/Bush during the 2000 and 2004 elections in what is politely called "oppo research."

As Griffin put it in a BBC documentary cited by Mayer called Digging the Dirt, about the oppo research done against Al Gore: "We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war. . . . We make the bullets."

Not incidentally, Griffin was appointed U.S. attorney after one of the Gonzales Eight was removed. Griffin didn't get Senate approval. He didn't need it, according to a provision of - get this - the Patriot Act, which allowed for "interim" appointments by the attorney general. I guess you use it in times of national emergency or when Karl Rove really, really wants a guy to get the job.

The House just voted to overturn the interim appointments. The Senate had already passed the bill. I wanted to ask Gonzales about it, but I thought of how futile it would be.

I already knew the real answer . It's another line from Animal House: You bleeped up. You trusted us.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com

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