In nasty and bumbling comments made at the White House yesterday, President Bush declared that “people just need to hear the truth” about the firing of eight United States attorneys. That’s right. Unfortunately, the deal Mr. Bush offered Congress to make White House officials available for “interviews” did not come close to meeting that standard.
Mr. Bush’s proposal was a formula for hiding the truth, and for protecting the president and his staff from a legitimate inquiry by Congress. Mr. Bush’s idea of openness involved sending White House officials to Congress to answer questions in private, without taking any oath, making a transcript or allowing any follow-up appearances. The people, in other words, would be kept in the dark.
The Democratic leaders were right to reject the offer, despite Mr. Bush’s threat to turn this dispute into a full-blown constitutional confrontation.
Congress has the right and the duty to fully investigate the firings, which may have been illegal, and Justice Department officials’ statements to Congress, which may have been untrue. It needs to question Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser, Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and other top officials.
It is hard to imagine what, besides evading responsibility, the White House had in mind. Why would anyone refuse to take an oath on a matter like this, unless he were not fully committed to telling the truth? And why would Congress accept that idea, especially in an investigation that has already been marked by repeated false and misleading statements from administration officials?
The White House notes that making misrepresentations to Congress is illegal, even if no oath is taken. But that seems to be where the lack of a transcript comes in. It would be hard to prove what Mr. Rove and others said if no official record existed.
The White House also put an unacceptable condition on the documents it would make available, by excluding e-mail messages within the White House. Mr. Bush’s overall strategy seems clear: to stop Congress from learning what went on within the White House, which may well be where the key decisions to fire the attorneys were made.
The White House argued that presidential advisers rarely testify before Congress, but that is simply not true. Many of President Clinton’s high-ranking advisers, including his White House counsels and deputy chief of staff, testified about Whitewater, allegations of campaign finance abuses and other matters.
Froomkin's take:
ReplyDeleteAnd consider this: Taken as a whole, Bush's statement was full of assertions that it's hard to consider anything but massive whoppers.
The champion of a "unitary executive" suddenly talking about the sanctity of the separation of powers? A man known to operate almost exclusively in a bubble of flatterers suddenly lashing out against a precedent that might lead to a president not getting candid advice?
And does Bush really think anyone other than his staunchest supporters would consider "reasonable" his proposal to make Karl Rove and other top aides available for private interviews with congressional investigators?
...So what is the president's strategy here? Undoubtedly, the prospect of it becoming open season in Washington for White House subpoenas is stiffening his spine. But even at a 30 percent approval rating, Bush is most likely still hopeful that he can bully Congressional Democrats into blinking. And he is probably counting on the press to help him, by shifting their attention from the firings themselves to the conflict over executive privilege, and by starting to hint that the Democrats may have overreached.
With the press continuing to uncritically relate even Bush's most equivocal statements as if he and his administration aren't suffering a staggering credibility problem, he may already be halfway there.
anthoer valued opinion:
ReplyDeleteGlenn Greenwald, blogging for Salon, finds a gem. Here's pre-press secretary Tony Snow in an op-ed headlined "Executive Privilege is a Dodge" in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on March 29, 1998:
"Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.
"Chances are that the courts will hurl such a claim out, but it will take time.
"One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public's faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold -- the rule of law."
And blogger Josh Marshall points out that one of the readers responding to his blog's request for help going through the documents noticed that the e-mails seem to have an 18-day gap between November 15 and December 4.
ReplyDelete"The firing calls went out on December 7th," Marshall writes. "But the original plan was to start placing the calls on November 15th. So those eighteen days are pretty key ones."
another twist:
ReplyDeleteJennifer Steinhauer and Eric Lipton write in the New York Times: "Democrats in Congress and others have suggested that Ms. Lam, the former United States attorney in San Diego, was ousted largely to stymie her investigations of Republicans and Defense Department officials, after a prosecution of a Republican congressman from California.
"But interviews with law enforcement officials in California and an examination of e-mail released by the Justice Department demonstrate that Ms. Lam was a source of longstanding vexation to the department, with which she differed on strategy."
Steinhauer and Lipton, however, seem to overlook the possibility that the complaints about Lam's immigration stance were a post-hoc rationalization. For instance, the severe memos about these "longstanding vexations" appear to have come after she notified the department that she intended to execute search warrants on a high-ranking official of the Central Intelligence Agency as part of her expanding investigation of elected Republicans.
one more!
ReplyDeleteVia U.S. News, Jay Leno: "This afternoon, President Bush held a news conference where he accused the Democrats of playing politics with the firing of the US attorneys. You know, the attorneys he fired for not playing politics?"