It’s ok if you lie, just like Hollywood you can do a retake!

Like most Hollywood sequels, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty’s return to Capitol Hill today was not quite the blockbuster its producers (the House Judiciary Committee) had hoped it would be.

Appearing in the committee room he once ruled as a top staffer in the 1990s, McNulty spent more than two hours explaining how little he knew about the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

Referred to as the “caboose” by one panel member, McNulty said that he never even spoke directly to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the pending mass firings until a Nov. 27, 2006 meeting at which the plan was finalized. “I was consulted in this process at the end of what we now know to be the process,” he explained.

McNulty said he knew nothing of an order that placed much hiring and firing authority inside the attorney general’s office, including a notation not to let the “DAG” see the order, until he saw a report on it in National Journal. “I still don’t know to this day why that was the case,” he said.

More at the Washington Post