Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) isn’t playing games.
The Democratic senator leading the inquiry into the dismissal of federal prosecutors insisted Sunday that Karl Rove and other top aides to President Bush must testify publicly and under oath, setting up a confrontation between Congress and the White House, which has said it is unlikely to agree to such a demand.
Some Republicans have suggested that Mr. Rove testify privately, if only to tamp down the political uproar over the inquiry, which centers on whether the White House allowed politics to interfere with law enforcement.
But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seemed to rule out such a move on Sunday. He said his committee would vote Thursday on whether to issue subpoenas for Mr. Rove as well as Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, and William K. Kelley, the deputy White House counsel.
“I do not believe in this ‘We’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything,’ and they don’t,” Mr. Leahy said on “This Week” on ABC, adding: “I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this.”
White House counselor Dan Bartlett has said it is “highly unlikely” that the president would waive executive privilege to allow his top aides to testify publicly. One Republican strategist close to the White House, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to appear to be representing the administration, said: “No president is going to let their senior staff assistant to the president go testify. Forget that. They might agree to do an informal interview, but they’ll never testify.”
In response, congressional Dems have noted a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which notes that presidential advisers, including 47 from the Clinton administration alone, have frequently testified before Congressional committees, both while serving the president and after they had left the White House.
The difference is, of course, that those other officials may not have quite as much to hide as Bush’s top aides.
In other purge-related news:
* Former U.S. attorney David Iglesias beat back several misleading claims by Bush administration officials during an interview on Fox News yesterday, and reasserted that his firing was a “political hit.”
* On a related note, the Justice Department has said Iglesias needed to be fired because he was lax in prosecuting voter fraud cases. It’s interesting, therefore, to remember that Iglesias was heralded for his expertise in voter fraud cases by the Justice Department, which twice selected him to train other federal prosecutors to pursue election crimes.
* Former U.S. Attorneys are speaking out about the scandal. “People who understand the history and the mission of the United States attorney and Justice Department — they are uniformly appalled, horrified,” said Atlee W. Wampler III, chairman of a national organization of former United States attorneys and a prosecutor who served in the Carter and Reagan administrations. “That the tradition of the Justice Department could have been so warped by that kind of action — any American should be disturbed.”
* A new poll from Newsweek found that 58% of Americans (and 45% of Republicans) believe the purge was driven by political concerns, not job performance. Fewer than one third (32 percent) of those surveyed want Alberto Gonzales to remain in his job.
* An inauspicious sign for Gonzales’ future: the WaPo ran an editorial today describing the qualities Bush should look for in the next Attorney General.
* The AP has a schedule of purge-related events to look for this week, including the DoJ’s plan to turn over more documents to Congress about the role agency officials played in planning the prosecutors’ dismissals.
Stay tuned.