Bush Opposes Congress on Getting Aides to Testify

By Mark Silva and Andrew Zajac

A defiant President Bush vowed Tuesday to fight any effort by Congress to compel the testimony of top White House advisers about the firing of federal prosecutors, setting up a potential constitutional showdown and the first major direct confrontation with the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill.

The president also defended embattled Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and accused Democrats of trying to score “political points” rather than “gather facts” about the dismissal last year of eight U.S. attorneys.

Bush offered instead to release all White House communications related to the firings and to allow his aides to be interviewed privately but not under oath, a proposal that Democrats rejected.

“There is no indication that anybody did anything improper,” he said. “We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants.”

The president said he would challenge in court any subpoena of his top aides.

Democratic leaders said they would press ahead with plans to subpoena Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and others.

The White House’s offer to let Rove and others answer congressional questions “doesn’t do the job of figuring out what happened,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Fred F. Fielding, counsel to the president, said the White House is trying to fully cooperate, explaining in a letter to congressional leaders that “the president must remain faithful to the fundamental interests of the presidency and the requirements of the constitutional separation of powers.”

At the same time, Fielding wrote, more than 3,000 pages of documents delivered to Capitol Hill by the Justice Department this week “do not reflect that any U.S. attorney was replaced to interfere with a pending or future criminal investigation.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., complaining that the Justice Department has provided conflicting stories about the prosecutors’ firings, said: “If Karl Rove plans to tell the truth, he has nothing to fear from being under oath, like any other witness.”

The threat of subpoenas is not the only political fire the White House is trying to douse. With Democratic leaders, and some Republicans, calling for Gonzales’ resignation, Bush telephoned his attorney general, his longtime friend from Texas, shortly after dawn Tuesday with “a very strong vote of confidence.”

“He’s got support with me. I support the attorney general,” the president said later.

The White House also rejected as “just flat false” news reports that the Bush administration already is considering possible replacements for Gonzales.

Earlier in the day, in a sweeping bipartisan rebuke of the Bush administration, the Senate voted, 94-2, to end Gonzales’ power to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. That power had been inserted into a revision of the Patriot Act last year at the Justice Department’s request.

The massive document delivery from the Justice Department to Congress sheds little new light on the controversy. But it provided a window on behind-the-scenes confrontations between some of the prosecutors who would eventually be fired and critics in Congress and the Justice Department.

In an Aug. 31, 2006, e-mail, for example, Brent Ward, the head of a Justice Department anti-pornography task force, complained to a colleague he had “sat in a meeting with [prosecutor] Paul Charlton in Phoenix and heard him thumb his nose at us” with a reluctance to take on obscenity cases.

Ward also complained about another fired prosecutor, Daniel Bogden of Nevada.

Seven of the eight prosecutors were fired Dec. 7, while the eighth, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, resigned in June and was replaced by a Rove protege.

As awareness of the firings increased in January, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and other officials involved in the dismissals assembled a list of criticisms of each of the dismissed prosecutors for use in congressional testimony.

Bogden was found to have a “lack of energy and leadership for a highly visible district with serious crime issues,” while Charlton was tagged with “repeated instances of defiance, insubordination, actions taken contrary to instructions, and actions taken that were clearly unauthorized.”

Conspicuous by his silence in the records is Gonzales, who, a spokesman said, does not use e-mail, making him less likely to leave a paper trail.

(c) 2007 Buffalo News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.