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By Lynn Sweet
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Posted: 03/21/07 05:50 PM [ET] |
President Bush said he wants to avoid a confrontation with congressional leaders over top White House staffers telling lawmakers about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. He offered Congress a deal. But he is getting no takers and the prospects for negotiation seem bleak.
“We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants,” Bush said on Tuesday. However, he made an offer to cooperate with so many strings attached that the top House and Senate leaders are poised to turn him down.
So the question is: Does Bush hope to defuse calls for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign? One would think. Or dampen the notion the federal prosecutors were fired because of politics? Of course. Is this flap over staffer testimony really just a question of protecting executive privilege so the president gets candid advice?
It’s not clear at all that being combative at this point over testimony can save Gonzales or convince the public, much less skeptical Republican and Democratic lawmakers, that the firings were justified. On the plus side, the Bush White House is handing over documents and e-mails — even with material redacted.
Look at the restrictive ground rules the White House wants in exchange for allowing top White House political adviser Karl Rove and former Bush counsel Harriet Miers to talk to Congress. No sworn testimony. Bush is even barring transcripts of any questioning — a tact designed to ensure confusion about what was said and who said it — even if it is exculpatory information.
“It will be regrettable,” Bush said, if the Democratic leaders of Congress “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. I have proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse. I hope they don’t choose confrontation. I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials.”
So no surprise then when the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday voted to approve — but not issue — subpoenas to Rove, Miers and others. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to give Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) the authority to send subpoenas.
Leahy told NPR, “If it’s going to be full and complete testimony I would have accepted it, but they put all kinds of conditions. They want to meet in private, they’ll want to meet only with a very few members of Congress, they don’t want it under oath. That’s unacceptable. … One of the reasons we’re in the problem is that we’ve all been given these … closed briefings where we have had a few members there, where they come up and say, ‘Here, we’ve given you the complete story,’ and then three days later we pick up the paper and find out all the things they left out of the story. I want them under oath. I want them before the whole committee. Both Republicans and Democrats can ask them questions, but I want the public to know what they’re saying and I want their testimony under oath.”
White House spokesman Tony Snow, noting that there is a difference between authorizing and issuing subpoenas, said if they are issued, the offer on the table “becomes moot.” Maybe there is a way to negotiate a compromise here — a transcript seems the least the public is entitled to have, whether the testimony is sworn or not.
Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. E-mail:
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