House panel defies Bush, votes for subpoenas
 

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/...ngs/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- House Democrats voted Wednesday to give their leaders the authority to force White House officials to testify on the firings of U.S. attorneys.

The House Judiciary subcommittee vote was to authorize subpoenas. It does not mean that subpoenas will be issued; only that they could be if the four White House officials Democrats want to question do not voluntarily testify under oath.

But the act puts congressional Democrats on a collision course with President Bush. He said Tuesday that the four -- top political adviser Karl Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers, and their two deputies -- could be interviewed in the matter, but no oath could be administered and no transcript would be taken.

Rep. John Conyers, head of the House Judiciary Committee, said during Wednesday's debate that the committee needed more than a simple conversation with Rove, Miers and their deputies.

"We could meet at the local pub to have that kind of conversation," he said. "But in my judgment it would not advance us toward uncovering the simple truth in this matter."

Democrats say transcripts are necessary so any inconsistencies in testimony can be challenged.

GOP members of the committee urged more investigation before authorization of subpoenas was discussed.

"I would strongly prefer that we postpone the issuance of subpoenas until we've had a chance to get the White House, who has made an offer to comply, to review the Department of Justice documents," said Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Florida.

"And I for one would be prepared at the proper time to vote if there was any potential that misconduct occurred."

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote on the authorization of subpoenas Thursday.

The committees are considering issuing subpoenas to force Rove, Miers and their two deputies to reveal what they knew about the reasons behind the firings of at least seven U.S. attorneys.

Bush said sworn testimony by White House officials would breach executive privilege -- the right of the president to have confidential communications with his staff -- and vowed Congress would face a legal fight if subpoenas are issued.

The president can fire federal prosecutors without cause, but lawmakers are questioning whether the firings of several U.S. attorneys were politically motivated.

Justice Department officials say the dismissals of at least seven U.S. attorneys were based on performance or managerial problems, but acknowledged that one fired attorney was pushed out to make way for a Rove protege.

"We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants," Bush said Tuesday. "The initial response by Democrats, unfortunately, shows that some are more interested in scoring political points than in understanding the facts."

'Erasing large portions' of 'selectively sent documents'
Bush said he will not allow Rove and the others to testify under oath because it would damage their ability to give the president "candid advice."

But, he said, "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his key staff will testify before the relevant congressional committees to explain how the decision was made and for what reasons."

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vermont, also complained about the 3,000 documents the Justice Department handed over to the committees late Monday, saying redactions in the documents make them unworkable.

"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," he said.

The president's offer also includes communications between White House staffers and the Justice Department on the firings, although not communications between various White House officials on the matter.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said the administration could be expected to challenge any subpoena in court, meaning the legal proceedings could outlast the Bush presidency.

"It goes to the district court and then potentially the Supreme Court and you're talking about an administration with 21 months to go. You can do the math. Courts don't work that fast," Toobin said on CNN's "American Morning."

Critics say firings abused Patriot Act
Critics of the firing of the prosecutors said the administration abused the Patriot Act in circumventing the usual confirmation procedure in naming their replacements.

The Senate on Tuesday voted 94-2 to pass a bill that cancels a provision of the Patriot Act that allowed federal prosecutors to be appointed and serve without confirmation by the Senate.

The controversy over the firings has cost the job of Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and prompted several from both sides of the aisle to call for Gonzales' resignation. But on Tuesday, Bush said Gonzales has his full support.

"I am confident he acted appropriately," Bush said from the White House. "I regret that it turned into a public spectacle."

"There is no indication [after reviewing the matter] that anyone did anything improper," the president said.

Thank god for the November 2006 election.

This is good. I think. Right? Honestly, I've been trying to read the news, but I just can't keep up with all this stuff. Actually, it's more that I don't get it. Can someone explained to me what was done & by whom?

BushCo is royally screwed. This is the beginning of the end for them. It's all over, people.

They fired , I think 7 or 8 federal prosecutors for politically motivated reasons. Now, these are presidential appointees if I'm not mistaken. It is not uncommon for a newly elected president to come in a clean house in his first term. My understanding is that President Clinton and others have done it. The sticky wicket here seems to be that Karl Rove got rid of at least one of them to make way for one of his trysts...I mean protoges. Let me see if I can find the origianl article when this story broke. There is more to it than I have mentioned here. But I, like you have been unable to keep up with the entire story.

Most administrations "clean house" at the Justice Dept when they come into office.

Gonzales stated under oath to congress that he would never fire a US attorney for political reasons (U.S. attorneys are supposed to serve the rule of law, not political ideology).

Harriet Miers, Karl Rove, and Gonzales were all involved in the firing of eight US attorneys because they were unhappy that the attorneys were not "Bushies".

The Justice Dept. stated that the attorneys were fired for "performance issues"- when, in fact, all of the attorneys fired had received glowing performance reviews during their careers. Many of these US attorneys were prosecuting cases against republicans.

The Justice Dept. sneakily inserted language into the Patriot Act allowing the Bush administration to replace fired US attorneys without Senate review and confirmation.

This is going to be fun to watch. Conyers knows what he's doing. It's not his first time at this rodeo and Leahy isn't screwing around either. They're going to put the screws to them, executive privilege or no. Haha. My prediction is that they will end up ordering subpoenas on Thursday and these folks will end up testifying under oath as they should. How generous of Lord Pissypants to allow Congress to "have a conversation with them" not under oath. Who the f*ck does he think he's kidding? It's over babe.

Thanks for the briefing guys, I understand it more now. :nod:

Chuck Schumer is so pissed off he nearly blew a gasket. You know they're in freeeeking trouble when conservative yahoos like John Sununu are calling for Gonzales to resign.

I'll believe it when I see it. I'm seeing going to the Supreme Court. Scalito will finally get his chance to crown King George VII.

His hubris is disgusting. But, it's par for the course with this asshole. I wouldn't have expected him to say anything new.

This is all fine and dandy and shame on W and his cronies. But, the sole issue is will this matter enough to people to get them to vote for:

1. Hillary

or

2. Obama

Maybe enough conservatives will not vote :shrug:

Here's a good article from the NYT giving an overview of the whole thing:

Gonzales Says ‘Mistakes Were Made’ in Firing of Prosecutors

WASHINGTON, March 13 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, under criticism from lawmakers of both parties for the dismissals of federal prosecutors, insisted Tuesday that he would not resign, but said, “I acknowledge that mistakes were made here.”

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales acknowledged during a news conference at the Justice Department today that "mistakes were made."
The mea culpa came as Congressional Democrats, who are investigating whether the White House was meddling in Justice Department affairs for political reasons, demanded that President Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, explain their roles in the firings.

With Mr. Bush traveling in Mexico, the White House insisted that the president’s role had been minimal and laid the blame primarily on Harriet E. Miers, who was White House counsel when the prosecutors lost their jobs and who stepped down in January.

“The White House did not play a role in the list of the seven U.S. attorneys,” said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush’s counselor, referring to a roster of those who were fired.

Mr. Bartlett said it was “highly unlikely” that Mr. Rove would testify publicly to Congress about any involvement he might have had. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t find other ways to try to share that information,” he said.

With Democrats vowing to get to the bottom of who had ordered the firings and why, the White House scrambled to put its own spin on the controversy by releasing a stream of e-mail messages detailing how Ms. Miers had corresponded with D. Kyle Sampson, the top aide to Mr. Gonzales who drafted the list of those to be dismissed. [Page 16.]

Mr. Sampson resigned Monday. On Tuesday afternoon, at a press conference in an ornate chamber adjacent to his office, Mr. Gonzales pledged to “find out what went wrong here,” even as he insisted he had no direct knowledge of how his staff had made the firing decisions. He said he had rejected an earlier idea, which the White House said was put forth by Ms. Miers, that all 93 of the attorneys, the top federal prosecutors in their regions, be replaced.

“I felt that was a bad idea,” he said, “and it was disruptive.”

With Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, insisting that Mr. Gonzales should step down, his appearance underscored what two Republicans close to the Bush administration described as a growing rift between the White House and the attorney general. Mr. Gonzales has long been a confidant of the president but has aroused the ire of lawmakers of both parties on several issues, including the administration’s domestic eavesdropping program.

The two Republicans, who spoke anonymously so they could share private conversations with senior White House officials, said top aides to Mr. Bush, including Fred F. Fielding, the new White House counsel, were concerned that the controversy had so damaged Mr. Gonzales’s credibility that he would be unable to advance the White House agenda on sensitive national security matters, including terror prosecutions.

“I really think there’s a serious estrangement between the White House and Alberto now,” one of the Republicans said.

Already, Democrats are pressing the case for revoking the president’s authority, gained with the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act last year, to appoint interim federal prosecutors indefinitely, without Senate confirmation. The administration has argued that such appointments are necessary to speed the prosecution of terrorism cases. After the dismissals became a big political issue last week, Mr. Gonzales signaled that the administration would not oppose the changes being sought by the Democrats.

“We now know that it is very likely that the amendment to the Patriot Act, which was made in March of 2006, might well have been done to facilitate a wholesale replacement of all or part of U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who serves on the Judiciary Committee. “Who authorized all of this? Who asked for that change?”

Questions about whether the firings were politically motivated have been swirling through the administration since January. But they reached a fever pitch on Tuesday with disclosures by the White House that Mr. Bush had spoken directly with Mr. Gonzales to pass on concerns from Republican lawmakers, among them Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, about the way certain prosecutors were handling cases of voter fraud.

The White House took the unusual step of having Mr. Bartlett conduct a hurried briefing with reporters in Mérida, Mexico. He said the president had “all the confidence in the world” in Mr. Gonzales and traced the idea for the firings to Ms. Miers, saying she had raised the question of whether the Justice Department should clean house in Mr. Bush’s second term, as is common when a new president comes into office.

“What Harriet Miers was doing was taking a look and floating an idea to say, ‘Hey, should we treat the second term very similar to the way we treat a first term?’ ” Mr. Bartlett said.

White House officials reiterated Tuesday that Mr. Bush had not called for the removal of any particular United States attorney and said there was no evidence that the president had been aware that the Justice Department had initiated a process to generate a list of which prosecutors should lose their jobs.

But inside the White House, aides to the president, including Mr. Rove and Joshua B. Bolten, the chief of staff, were said to be increasingly concerned that the controversy could damage Mr. Bush.

“They’re taking it seriously,” said the other of the two Republicans who spoke about the White House’s relationship with Mr. Gonzales. “I think Rove and Bolten believe there is the potential for erosion of the president’s credibility on this issue.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties expressed anger about the administration’s handling of the matter. While Democrats voiced the loudest criticism, several leading Republicans — among them Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, John Ensign of Nevada, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and George V. Voinovich of Ohio — said Tuesday that they also had concerns.

Mr. Ensign, ordinarily a strong supporter of the White House, said he was “very angry” at how the administration had handled the dismissal of the prosecutors, particularly Dan Bogden, the United States attorney in Nevada. Mr. Ensign said he had been misled or lied to last year when he asked the Justice Department about the firing of Mr. Bogden and was told that it had been connected to his job performance.

“I’m not a person who raises his voice very often,” said Mr. Ensign, who is also the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate. Of his decision to speak out, he said, “I think there are times where you just have to do what you feel is right, and this is one of those times.”

Mr. Coburn said the firings had been bungled, calling them “idiocy on the part of the administration.”

Mr. Specter, in a speech on the Senate floor, referred to another of the dismissed attorneys, Carol C. Lam, who prosecuted Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman now serving an eight-year sentence in a corruption case.

Mr. Specter raised the question of whether Ms. Lam had been dismissed because she was “about to investigate other people who were politically powerful,” and he questioned the Justice Department’s initial explanation that those who had lost their jobs had received poor performance evaluations.

“Well,” he said, “I think we may need to do more by way of inquiry to examine what her performance ratings were to see if there was a basis for her being asked to resign.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/wa...67b11c&ei=5070

The problem now is, if Gonzales does resign they will try to replace him with soemone equally gross. However, the nominee would have to be confirmed by the Senate. That could get very interesting.
What I would really like to see is Karl Rove with his (political) balls cut off. Harriet and the others are just collateral damage, now aren't they?

That third dark horse hasn't entered the race yet. And we all know he's really no dark horse at all. :)
But really it's all about the pardons too. Will what Scooter's wife said the other day come true? ("We are going to f*ck them!") Or will they reward him for falling on his sword? I guess we'll have to wait until Christmas Eve 2008 to see. The apple doesn't fall that far from the tree.

The pardons come after the election and right as the Pres. is leaving office - at least traditionally.

Who? Edwards? Gore?