There are three steps for the House to bringing contempt charges against an individual: committee approval, a floor vote in the House, and a referral to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
The House passed step one less than an hour ago.
The House Judiciary Committee voted contempt of Congress citations Wednesday against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and President Bush’s former legal counselor, Harriet Miers.
The 22-17 vote — which would sanction for pair for failure to comply with subpoenas on the firings of several federal prosecutors — advanced the citation to the full House.
A senior Democratic official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the House itself likely would take up the citations after Congress’ August recess. The official declined to speak on the record because no date had been set for the House vote.
Committee Chairman John Conyers said the panel had nothing to lose by advancing the citations because it could not allow presidential aides to flout Congress’ authority. Republicans warned that a contempt citation would lose in federal court even if it got that far.
The vote, not surprisingly, was along party lines.
The second step shouldn’t be too big a problem — fortunately, the House GOP can’t filibuster — but getting the U.S. Attorney to pursue the matter is, as we recently learned, complicated. The White House has said Bush alone can gauge the limits of his own powers after he’s claimed executive privilege, so the president won’t allow a U.S. Attorney to pursue the case.
It’s worth adding, though, that the House Dems certainly did their homework on this one. Before the vote, the Judiciary Committee released a 52-page memo (.pdf) detailing the potential criminal conduct the White House is covering up by claiming executive privilege.
Republicans have argued, aggressively, that that Congress would likely lose a court battle if they could not show criminal wrongdoing. So, that’s exactly what Dems have done.
The report says that Congress’s seven-month investigation into the firings raises “serious concerns” that senior White House and Justice Department aides involved in the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year may have obstructed justice and violated federal statutes that protect civil service employees, prohibit political retaliation against government officials and cover presidential records.
The 52-page memorandum, from House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), seeks to explain why Democrats are trying to overcome an effort by the White House to shield officials and documents from the congressional inquiry through a claim of executive privilege. The report also provides the first written account of the Democrats’ interpretation of the firings and the administration’s response to the controversy.
The investigation “has uncovered serious evidence of wrongdoing by the department and White House staff,” Conyers says.
The memorandum says the probe has turned up evidence that some of the U.S. attorneys were improperly selected for firing because of their handling of vote fraud allegations, public corruption cases or other cases that could affect close elections. It also says that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior Justice aides “appear to have made false or misleading statements to Congress, many of which sought to minimize the role of White House personnel.”
In addition, the memorandum asserts repeatedly that the president’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, was the first administration official to broach the idea of firing U.S. attorneys shortly after the 2004 election — an assertion the White House has said is not true.
In one of more than 300 footnotes, the Democrats point to a Jan. 6, 2005, e-mail from an assistant White House counsel that says that Rove “stopped by to ask . . . how we planned to proceed regarding U.S. attorneys, whether we were going to allow them to stay, request resignations from all and accept only some of them, or selectively replace them, etc.”
The memorandum says that lawmakers need access to White House information to determine whether laws were broken and to rewrite laws regarding U.S. attorneys.
The White House cited a 1984 Justice Department legal opinion, which was not tested in the courts, that said a federal prosecutor cannot be compelled to bring a case seeking to override a president’s executive privilege claim. The new report said the 1984 opinion “does not apply here.”
Stay tuned.