Bush, Democrats clash on prosecutors
President backs AG, refuses call for aides to testify
WASHINGTON -- The controversy over the Bush administration's firing of eight US attorneys escalated into a high-stakes political confrontation between President Bush and Congress yesterday, with Bush backing his embattled attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, and rebuffing a request from top Democratic lawmakers to have chief White House adviser Karl Rove and other aides testify under oath about whether the firings were politically motivated.
"It will be regrettable if they choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials when I have agreed to make key White House officials and documents available," Bush said. The president offered instead to allow Rove and others to provide a private interview to congressional staffers, with no transcript allowed -- something top Democrats in Congress rejected as insufficient.
"After telling a bunch of different stories about why they fired the US attorneys, the Bush a dministration is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt," the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said in a statement. "Congress and the American people deserve a straight answer. If Karl Rove plans to tell the truth, he has nothing to fear from being under oath like any other witness."
But the president vowed to fight any subpoena in court.
"My concern is, [Democratic leaders] would rather be involved with partisanship," Bush said. "They view this as an opportunity to score political points. And anyway, the proposal we put forward is a good one. There really is a way for people to get information. We'll just find out what's on their mind."
The president's press conference was held hours after the Senate delivered a bipartisan slap at Bush, voting 94 to 2 to strip Gonzales's authority to appoint interim US attorneys without Senate confirmation -- authority granted to him in a revision of the USA Patriot Act. The law, passed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, delivered sweeping new powers to the Department of Justice, based on the need to investigate and thwart terrorism.
With Democrats promptly blasting Bush's refusal to allow Rove's testimony, Bush took the unusual step of delivering a nationally televised statement late yesterday in support of the attorney general.
Bush offered no apologies for the way the firings were handled. Nor did he say, as Gonzales has, that mistakes were made.
Instead, Bush said he supported Gonzales's decisions, insisted there is "no indication that anybody did anything improper," adding, "I regret these resignations turned into such a public spectacle."
Bush also said Gonzales would continue to serve. "He's got support with me. I support the attorney general."
At issue in the confrontation is White House assertions that allowing aides to testify before Congress would violate executive privilege. But congressional Democrats -- and some Republicans -- maintain that such testimony is in line with lawmakers' oversight authority, and other presidents have allowed it.
But Bush said allowing lawmakers to "haul somebody up in front of Congress and put them in oath and, you know, all the klieg lights and all the questioning, it -- to me, it makes it very difficult for a president to get good advice."
The controversy has its roots in a 2005 discussion among Bush aides on whether to summarily fire all 93 US attorneys. E-mails showed that Bush aides became concerned about the appearance of such a mass firing and focused instead on US attorneys that chaf ed the most against administration policy.
Rove's role has become a central focus because one of the fired US attorneys, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, was ousted and replaced with a Rove aide, Tim Griffin. Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, wrote in an e-mail that "getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.," a reference to former White House counsel Harriet Miers and Rove.
Another of the fired US attorneys, David Iglesias of New Mexico, said on Fox News this week that his firing had nothing to do with his job evaluation.
"Performance has nothing to do with this," Iglesias said. "This is a political hit."
Iglesias said he was put on the Justice Department's list of US attorneys to be fired after Senator Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, complained that he wasn't prosecuting Democrats over alleged voter fraud. Iglesias said he wanted to prosecute the voter fraud case, but "I didn't have the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, so I did not prosecute."
A third fired US attorney, Carol Lam of San Diego, had prosecuted a Republican congressman, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, and was pursuing a broader investigation. An e-mail from Sampson, who resigned last week as Gonzales's chief of staff, referred to "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires."
That e-mail has raised questions about whether the Bush administration was trying to shut down an investigation that targeted Republicans.
Bush, asked at his briefing last night whether his administration was trying to stifle investigations of Republicans in California and elsewhere, responded: "It may give the appearance of something, but I think what you need to do is listen to the facts."
Bush's support of Gonzales came hours after the release of 3,000 pages of e-mails and other documents about the role of administration officials in the firings. Democrats said the documents show a pattern: Bush's top aides tried to oust federal prosecutors the White House viewed as politically out of step, then justify the dismissals by saying the prosecutors were underperformers. Democrats said the documents' contents underscored the need to take sworn testimony from those aides on the matter.
But White House counsel Fred Fielding rejected that reasoning in a letter to Congress yesterday, writing that the documents do not show the attorneys were fired "to interfere with a pending or future criminal investigation or for any other improper reason," the only circumstance in which congressional testimony would be appropriate.
Fielding wrote that interviews with Rove and others "would be private and conducted without the need for an oath, transcript, subsequent testimony, or the subsequent issuance of subpoenas."
After meeting with Fielding, however, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont said last night in a statement: "I don't accept his offer. It is not constructive and it is not helpful to be telling the Senate how to do our investigation, or to prejudge its outcome."
The release of documents shows that the White House is still not coming clean on the matter, Leahy said: "Instead of freely and fully providing relevant documents to the investigating committees, they have only selectively sent documents, after erasing large portions that they do not want to see the light of day." 