schedule "he attended an hour-long meeting at which, aides said, he approved a detailed plan for executing the purge." Despite insisting that he was not involved in the "deliberations" leading up to the firing of the attorneys, newly released emails also suggest that he had indeed been notified and that he had given ultimate approval. In his prepared testimony to Congress on April 19, 2007, Gonzales insisted he left the decisions on the firings to his staff. ABC News, however, obtained an internal department email showing that Gonzales urged the ouster of Carol Lam, one of the fired attorneys, six months before she was asked to leave. During actual testimony on April 19, Gonzales stated at least 71 times that he couldn't recall events related to the controversy. Those dubious explanations led to diminished Senate support for his continued tenure, with even conservative Republicans Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma calling for his resignation. His responses frustrated the Democrats on the committee, as well as several Republicans. One example of such frustration came in an exchange between Sessions and Gonzales regarding a November 2006 meeting. Sessions was one of the most conservative members of the Senate, and was one of the Bush Administration's staunchest allies. At the meeting, the attorney firings were purportedly discussed, but Gonzales did not remember such discussion. As reported by the Washington Post, the dialogue went as follows: Another example came when Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who had been the first lawmaker to call for Gonzales's ouster, declined to ask his last round of questions. Instead, a visibly angry Schumer said there was no point to further questioning and reiterated his call for Gonzales to resign. By Schumer's count, Gonzales had stated "over a hundred times" that he didn't know or couldn't recall important details concerning the firings, and also didn't seem to know about the workings of his own department. Gonzales responded that the onus was on the committee to prove whether anything improper occurred. Schumer replied that Gonzales faced a higher standard, and that under this standard he had to give "a full, complete and convincing explanation" for why the eight attorneys were fired. Both Democrats and Republicans were critical of Gonzales's testimony to congress, which was widely regarded as exhibiting greater loyalty to president Bush than to the truth. With increasing numbers of senators calling for him to