President Bush is the main force holding up the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, GOP sources say tonight. CBS News reports:

Republicans close to the White House tell CBS News chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod that President Bush is in “his usual posture: pugnacious, that no one is going to tell him who to fire.” But sources also said Gonzales’ firing is just a matter of time.

The White House is bracing for a weekend of criticism and more calls for Gonzales to go. One source tells CBS News he’s never seen the administration in such deep denial, and Republicans are growing increasingly restless for the president to take action.

Also tonight, CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux reported: “Wolf, I have to tell you, I’ve spoken to a lot of people who are friends of those here at the White House and GOP strategists. They want Gonzales gone. They’re putting a lot of pressure on this president. One of them said, look, Gonzales has a constituency of one, and that is the president. But tonight, Wolf, White House officials who I’ve spoken to say that that is exactly the person who’s saving his job, that the president does not intend to let him go.”

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Rep. Paul Gillmor (R-OH) has become the fourth Republican to call for Alberto Gonzales to resign. Gonzales “has become a lightning rod and has distracted” from the Justice Department’s mission, Gillmor said in a statement.

UPDATE: CBS’s Katie Couric reported tonight that Gonzales is “on his way out,” but White House spokesperson Dana Perino tells CNN that report is “dead wrong.”

“After weeks of cooperation with a new security plan, radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr decried U.S. forces as occupiers Friday and called on his followers to ‘shout “No, No America!”‘ in a sign of resurgent anger and opposition. Thousands of Shiites flooded from the mosque where al-Sadr’s statement was read by a preacher at Friday prayers, spilling into the streets of the Sadr City slum to protest the two-week-old American military presence there.”

In response to a question about the rights of divorced fathers, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in Iowa today “said that he wouldn’t want to interfere in the decisions of divorce courts because doing so would be ‘getting into a tar baby of enormous proportions.’” (Memo to McCain: The expression tar baby is a racial slur “used occasionally as a derogatory term for black people.”)

UPDATE: McCain has apologized.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales planned to install his former aide Kyle Sampson as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s environment division even after Sampson’s “resignation,” NPR reported today.

Media outlets have reported this week that Sampson, Gonzales’ ex-chief of staff, resigned over the U.S. Attorney scandal on Monday. But as ThinkProgress noted, Gonzales on Tuesday made vague remarks during his press conference indicating that Sampson was still on the department payroll. “His transition — as a technical matter, he is at the Department as he transitions out and looks for another employment.”

In fact, Gonzales “started to set up a new office for Sampson” in the Justice Department, and Sampson only resigned on Tuesday when “the scandal surrounding eight fired U.S. Attorneys continued to grow.” A Justice official told NPR that “there were discussions about whether or not he would be detailed elsewhere as he was transitioning out and ultimately it was decided not to go that direction.”

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Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Foundation has launched an online war memorial that honors members of the U.S. armed forces who lost their lives serving in Iraq. The Memorial is a collection of video memories from family, friends, and military colleagues of those who have fallen. Watch their video here:

Monday marks the four year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. See our timeline HERE.

“Bob Perry, a Texas homebuilder and one of the primary funders of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, has signed on to raise money for the presidential campaign of former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.).”

House members this week removed language from the Iraq spending bill (which was passed by committee yesterday) that would require President Bush to get congressional authorization for any war against Iran. But CQ reports:

On March 13, the same day House Appropriations Chairman David R. Obey, D-Wis., said he had removed the Iran provision from the draft war spending measure, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., quietly promised Appropriations Committee Democrats that she would soon bring the measure up as a stand-alone bill, said James P. Moran, D-Va., who attended the meeting in Pelosi’s suite.

MoveOn ran a full-page ad on Iran today in the Washington Post. See the full version (pdf) HERE.

Dr. James Knodell, director of the Office of Security at the White House, revealed today that to his knowledge the White House has never ordered a probe, report, or sanctions as a result of the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. “I have no knowledge of any investigation in my office,” he said.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said he was “shocked” by Knodell’s testimony, adding that the White House’s lack of action was a “breach on top of a breach.”

Knodell claimed the White House did not investigate because there was an outside investigation taking place. But Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) noted that the investigation “didn’t start until months and months later, and [only] had the purpose of narrowly looking to see whether there was a criminal law violated.” Waxman asked, “But there was an obligation for the White House to investigate whether classified information was being leaked inappropriately, wasn’t there?” Knodell answered, “If that was the case, yes.” Watch it:

Shortly after the leak was revealed by Novak, Bush said he wanted an investigation to identify the leaker:

A senior official quoted Bush as saying, “I want to get to the bottom of this,” during a daily meeting yesterday morning with a few top aides, including Rove.

Bush: “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.“

E&P reports, “The White House had first opposed Knodell testifying but after a threat of a subpoena from the committee yesterday he was allowed to appear today.” The Gavel has more.

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UPDATE: Rep. Waxman wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten asking him to explain why the White House failed to conduct any investigation following the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA employment. Read it here.

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