WASHINGTON (AP) – Attorney General Alberto Gonzales heads to Capitol Hill on Monday to defend the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program to skeptical lawmakers from both parties. It’s a job for which the low-key, presidential confidant has shown himself well-suited.

Affable and measured in his public remarks, Gonzales is strikingly different from his predecessor at the Justice Department, John Ashcroft, who was more confrontational.

Behind the scenes, Gonzales has played important roles in some of the White House’s most contentious decisions. Examples include authorizing aggressive interrogation methods that critics say are akin to torture and tapping conversations of people within the United States without a warrant.

Gonzales acknowledges disagreement in the administration about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. “As with all difficult issues, there’s been a robust discussion and analysis with respect to this program,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press last week.

In one instance, Gonzales, while White House counsel, reportedly tried to persuade Ashcroft to override objections to the surveillance that arose within the department in 2004 and led to the program’s temporary suspension. The effort, which occurred while Ashcroft was hospitalized, failed. Gonzales would not confirm the account.

In written testimony prepared for Monday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA monitoring, Gonzales said news accounts of the program “are in almost every case, in one way or another, misinformed, confused, or wrong.”

The surveillance is both lawful and indispensable to U.S. security, Gonzales said in the testimony, a copy of which was obtained Saturday by AP. He confined his remarks to legal questions, refusing to discuss operational aspects of the highly classified program.

He drew a distinction between purely domestic conversations, which the administration has insisted are not part of the NSA monitoring, and “the international communications of persons reasonably believed to be members or agents of al-Qaida or affiliated terrorist organizations.

“This surveillance is narrowly focused and fully consistent with the traditional forms of enemy surveillance found to be necessary in all previous armed conflicts.”

In partial response to written questions submitted to him, Gonzales says the program “is not a dragnet that sucks in all conversations and uses computer searches to pick out calls of interest.”

Democrats and Republicans on the committee are unhappy with the legal justifications they have seen so far for the program; the White House’s refusal to release other documents; and their exclusion from the limited briefings that the administration has provided to a handful of lawmakers.

Some Democrats chide Gonzales for what they say is his unwillingness to challenge the president on the eavesdropping program and other matters that, in their opinion, have compromised civil liberties.

“The issue is whether this Justice Department, more than any other, is an arm of the president, sort of like the president’s law firm,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who voted against Gonzales’ confirmation as attorney general a year ago. “Nothing has dispelled those doubts.”

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, said of Gonzales, “Regrettably in my view, he has continued to act like the president’s in-house counsel.”

Scoffing at such complaints is a Republican on the committee, Texas Sen. John Cornyn.

“Obviously his job is different from that of the president. His job is to enforce the law, and I do believe that he has both the integrity and the professional ability to do whatever investigation needs to be done,” Cornyn said.

Despite the criticism, the 50-year-old Gonzales is not likely to yield ground in the nationally televised hearing.

“This program was not analyzed, reviewed and approved solely by me,” Gonzales said in the AP interview. The attorney general was seated at a conference table in a room adjacent to his office that was adorned with pictures of several predecessors, including Robert Kennedy.

“There are a number of people within the administration who may not have the same kind of relationship I have with the president who certainly agree with me that the president does have the legal authority to authorize this electronic surveillance of the enemy in a time of war,” Gonzales said.

Senators have had the chance before to question Gonzales’ expansive view on the exercise of presidential power.

During his confirmation hearing 13 months ago, Gonzales defended administration policies on interrogating detainees and assured lawmakers that Bush would not violate any laws.

In similarly personal terms, he has since rejected complaints that politics trumped policy in the lengthy lawsuit against tobacco companies and the department’s civil rights division’s actions in a redistricting case in Texas and a voter identification law in Georgia.

“The notion that this president I know so well, with his record of promoting minorities, would tolerate a politicized civil rights division is absurd,” Gonzales said. “The notion that I would, as the first Hispanic-American to serve as attorney general, is ridiculous.”

Former Attorney General William Barr, who worked for the first President Bush, said Gonzales has struck an appropriate balance, defending presidential exercise of authority while maintaining independence on prosecutorial issues.

“You can’t allow any political consideration or personal relationship to enter into it, and I have not seen any sign the White House has any role in handling individual cases,” Barr said.

Even as Gonzales has been a leading voice on such issues as renewing expiring provisions of the terrorism-fighting Patriot Act and defending the NSA program, federal prosecutors have forged ahead with a wide-ranging investigation of corrupt lobbying practices.

That inquiry has resulted in the conviction of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the indictment of the administration’s former top contracting officer. It threatens to ensnare several members of Congress.

The Patriot Act renewal has yet to win final congressional approval. Both the House and Senate have made only minor changes in the law after months of hearings and debate.

Ted Ullyot, who was Gonzales’ chief of staff until October and worked with him at the White House, said his former boss is not troubled by criticism. “How he is perceived is not his focus. His focus is on blocking, tackling and carrying out the job of attorney general,” Ullyot said.

Gonzales has scored style points with administration critics by inviting civil libertarians to his office, which Ashcroft never did. Gonzales also has removed the Ashcroft-era curtain that covered two partially clad Art Deco statues in the Justice Department’s Great Hall.

Gonzales has a long association with Bush, who named Gonzales as chief counsel in 1995 when Bush was Texas governor. Two years later, Bush picked the Harvard-educated son of migrant farm workers to be Texas’ secretary of state, the state’s top elections official. In 1999, Bush appointed Gonzales to the state Supreme Court.

AP-ES-02-04-06 1724EST