The Senate Judiciary Committee today authorized its Democratic chairman to issue subpoenas for top White House officials as part of an investigation into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, joining its House counterpart in spurning President Bush's offer to make the officials available under strict limitations.
The 19-member committee approved the subpoena authority in a voice vote after more than an hour of debate in which minority Republicans urged the panel's Democratic majority to avoid the prospect of a constitutional confrontation with the White House over executive privilege.
The committee's chairman, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), denounced what he called Bush's "take-it-or-leave-it offer" to allow "limited and one-time only" testimony behind closed doors, with no transcript and a restricted number of lawmakers present.
"The only thing they would accept is if the Senate did exactly what they told them to, which would be closed-door, limited number of people, limited agenda, no oath and no transcript, so nobody knows exactly what happened," Leahy said. "So there's really nothing to look for for a compromise, because that is not acceptable to me."
He described the White House offer as "nothing, nothing, nothing."
The committee's top Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), said he would prefer to have the White House aides appear in an open session that would be transcribed. But he said it was not necessary to insist that they testify under oath because it is illegal to give false information to Congress and the penalty for doing so is the same as for perjury. He said it was "indispensable that there be a transcript."
Specter urged the committee to "make a counterproposal to the White House" instead of authorizing subpoenas.
"I counsel my colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, to work hard to find a way to avoid an impasse here," he said. "We don't need a constitutional confrontation."
He and other Republicans warned that going ahead with subpoenas could result in a lengthy court battle, denying the committee any access to the White House aides for the remainder of Bush's term.
The vote ultimately went ahead, however. One Republican, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), said he wanted the record to show that he voted in favor of the subpoena power.
The committee last week authorized the use of subpoenas to compel the testimony of five Justice Department officials and six of the eight fired federal prosecutors if necessary, but it postponed a decision until today on subpoenas for top White House officials after Republicans expressed reservations. The panel is interested in questioning Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff, former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers and deputy White House counsel William K. Kelley.
The subpoena authority gives Leahy leverage in efforts to obtain the testimony of current and former officials if they refuse to appear voluntarily or Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales reconsiders his pledge to allow his subordinates to testify before the committee.
In brief comments to reporters today, Gonzales repeated the administration's denials that any of the U.S. attorneys were dismissed improperly, and he vowed to continuing cooperation with Congress.
He also rejected the idea, floated by a number of Democrats and some Republicans, that he should step down as attorney general. "I'm not going to resign," he said after an event in St. Louis.
"At the end of the day, we have a situation where the president of the United States has the authority to hire and to fire United States attorneys," Gonzales said. "I'm going to go up to Congress and provide informal clarification about what happened here. We are working with Congress voluntarily. No United States attorney was fired for improper reasons, and that's the message I'm going to deliver to the United States Congress."
The Senate panel's action came a day after a House Judiciary subcommittee voted to give the committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), the power to issue subpoenas for five current and former officials, as well as for "unredacted documents" from the White House and Justice Department. Among the five are Rove and Miers.
Last week, the Senate committee authorized subpoenas if necessary for D. Kyle Sampson, Gonzales's former chief of staff; Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty; Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's White House liaison; William W. Mercer, a nominee to become associate attorney general; and Michael A. Battle, who directed the office overseeing the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys and carried out the firings.
According to Gonzales and other Justice officials, Sampson's resignation March 12 was prompted by his failure to tell others in the department about his contacts with the White House, leading to testimony by McNulty and other officials that may have been misleading. However, Sampson disputed that version of events in a statement issued through his attorney Friday night, saying he "felt he had let the attorney general down in failing to . . . organize a more effective political response to the unfounded accusations of impropriety in the replacement process."
Sampson's statement, released by attorney Bradford A. Berenson, also suggested that his contacts with the White House were well known within Justice. If the contacts were not brought to the attention of McNulty and others, it was "because no one focused on it or deemed it important at the time," the statement said.
"The fact that the White House and Justice Department had been discussing the subject for several years was well-known to a number of other senior officials at the department, including others who were involved in preparing the department's testimony to Congress," it said.
Although Leahy suggested at today's executive session that Sampson has agreed to testify before the committee voluntarily next week, aides said later that they are still negotiating with Berenson the circumstances of Sampson's appearance. While a subpoena for Sampson has been authorized, it has not yet been issued.
The committee last week also authorized subpoenas for six of the eight fired U.S. attorneys: Carol S. Lam of San Diego, Bud Cummins of Little Rock, Paul K. Charlton of Phoenix, John McKay of Seattle, Daniel G. Bogden of Las Vegas and David C. Iglesias of Albuquerque. The other two fired U.S. attorneys, who were not included in last week's subpoena authorization, are Margaret Chiara of Grand Rapids, Mich., and Kevin V. Ryan of San Francisco.
Cummins was fired to make way for the appointment of a former Rove aide as U.S. attorney in Little Rock.
In debate before today's Senate Judiciary Committee vote, Democrats rebuffed GOP members' arguments that the panel should accept Bush's offer and postpone the subpoena authority for White House officials.
"We can always issue a subpoena . . . if we don't like what we get," Specter said. "Why not take what we can get, in the interest of finding out. . . ."
Leahy interjected, "No. What we're told we can get is nothing, nothing, nothing. We're told that we can have a closed-door meeting with no transcript, not under oath, limited number of people, and the White House will determine what the agenda is. That, to me, is nothing."
"Why waste our time bidding against ourselves when they've already said no?" Leahy asked. "All the things you've suggested might make sense, but they've already rejected it."
Referring to Bush, he said, "I know he's the decider for the White House. He's not the decider for the United States Senate."
Instead of an offer to negotiate, Leahy said, "we were told, 'You will do it this way or no way.'" In his 32 years in office, he said, "I've never heard the Senate take an ultimatum like that."
Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) told the committee, "It is clear to me that we have been misled from the very beginning in this situation. To this very day, nobody knows who ordered these firings or what the reasons for them were."
Although the Justice Department has provided more than 3,000 pages of e-mails and told lawmakers they have received everything they need for their inquiry, she suggested that some messages might have been withheld because they show Bush's involvement in the matter.
"There is a suspicious period of time where there were no e-mails, from around the 16th of November to the 7th of December" last year, Feinstein said. "The belief is that that was the time the president was traveling and people wanted to get presidential approval, which apparently, some people say, came forward on December 4th." She added, "I don't know whether that's true or not true."
Asked yesterday about the nearly three-week gap in the e-mails and whether Bush had to sign off on the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys, White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "The president has no recollection of this ever being raised with him."
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told the committee that "the ineptitude of how this was handled is astounding to me." Although "there's no doubt all of these U.S. attorneys were stellar in their performance," he said, it is the president's prerogative to "fire anybody that works at his pleasure," including for political reasons.
"Political doesn't necessarily denote illegal, wrongful or unjust," Coburn said.
With so many issues of importance to deal with, Congress should not "create for the purpose of sport . . . a 'constitutional crisis,'" he said.
Staff writers Dan Eggen and Paul Kane contributed to this report.
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