How far is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales willing to go to further Bush administration objectives? The answer emerging from a congressional inquiry into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys isn’t pretty.

A maze of contradictory Justice Department explanations for the dismissals — not to mention Gonzales’ proclivity to shift blame to whichever aide has most recently resigned — has already left the department’s credibility in tatters.

Now dramatic testimony from a former Justice Department official is calling into question how much longer Gonzales can legitimately lead the nation’s top law enforcement agency, an agency he once sought to undermine.

Former deputy attorney general James Comey told the Senate Tuesday that Gonzales, then White House legal counsel, was one of two administration officials who tried to bully Justice officials into signing off on President Bush’s domestic surveillance program in March 2004.

Gonzales and then-White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, went so far as to visit the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to pressure him to declare the program legal. Comey, who raced to the hospital when he learned of the plan, called the visit “an effort to take advantage of a very sick man.”

Ashcroft, in intensive care with pancreatitis, rebuked Card and Gonzales for being on the wrong side of the law and refused their request. The next day, Bush reauthorized the program — established in the wake of 9/11 to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mails without court oversight — despite being told by the Justice Department that it violated civil liberties.

Only later, faced with a possible mass resignation of Justice’s top people — Ashcroft included — did Bush relent and make undisclosed changes in the program to answer Justice’s concerns.

On Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska became the latest Republican to call for Gonzales to resign. “He has lost the moral authority to lead,” Hagel said.

There certainly is room to doubt whether Gonzales’ primary allegiance is to the rule of law or his political mentor, President Bush.

The image of Ashcroft — who himself displayed a cavalier approach to due process and the rights of U.S. citizens at times — trying to hold back the administration from taking the war against terrorism too far is revealing. The proposition that one of the men who tried to browbeat Ashcroft now has the same job of checking the Bush administration is chilling.