I’m not sure what to make of this, but it sure doesn’t smell good.
Part of having an independent commission studying the Sept. 11 attacks is the members’ independence. There are new questions, however, about whether the White House respected the panelists’ neutrality and objectivity before Richard Clarke testified last week. The Washington Post reported:
President Bush’s top lawyer placed a telephone call to at least one of the Republican members of the Sept. 11 commission when the panel was gathered in Washington on March 24 to hear the testimony of former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, according to people with direct knowledge of the call.
White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales called commissioner Fred F. Fielding, one of five GOP members of the body, and, according to one observer, also called Republican commission member James R. Thompson.
Only the participants know what they talked about, but the timing seems awfully convenient. Could Gonzales have been sharing sensitive information with the GOP commission members so as to try and discredit Clarke? At least one House Dem leader would like to know.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, wrote to Gonzales yesterday asking him to confirm and describe the conversations.
Waxman said “it would be unusual if such ex parte contacts occurred” during the hearing. Waxman did not allege that there would be anything illegal in such phone calls. But he suggested that such contacts would be improper because “the conduct of the White House is one of the key issues being investigated by the commission.”
(Waxman’s letter to Gonzales is available here as a pdf)
Could Gonzales be that foolish? He should have been going out of his way not to contact these commission members and compromise the integrity of the process.
I know this White House seems to believe every part of the government is open to manipulation based on Bush’s political agenda, but if there’s evidence that Gonzales was trying to influence the hearings to help discredit a White House critic, we’d have yet another serious White House scandal.
At this point, all the key players don’t want to talk about it.
White House spokesmen were unable to get a response from Gonzales.
Fielding did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Thompson declined yesterday to say whether he spoke with Gonzales. “I never talk about conversations with the White House,” he said.
No, of course not.