June 13, 2007
Subpoenas Sent To Harriet Miers, Sara Taylor
UPDATED.
The Senate and House Judiciary committees stepped up their dual investigations of the U.S. attorney firings today by issuing subpoenas to former White House counsel Harriet Miers and former White House political director Sara Taylor. It was the first time the committees have ordered former White House officials to testify on an episode that continues to cast doubt on the political independence of the Department of Justice.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers issued a subpoena for Miers to testify on July 12. Miers stepped down early this year, and is now back with Locke Liddell & Sapp, the Houston-based law firm she co-managed before joining the Bush administration in 2001. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy ordered Taylor before the committee on July 11.
(To read Miers' subpoena, click here [PDF]. To read Taylor's subpoena, as well as one ordering White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten to produce related documents, click here.)
Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate committee, painted the subpoenas as a last resort. In an interview with Bloomberg News, Specter said previous requests to speak with Taylor and Miers were met with silence.
But White House spokesman Tony Snow accused the lawmakers of seeking a "media circus" rather than the truth, citing the loads of internal documents already handed over to the committees. At the daily briefing, Snow reminded reporters that it is legal for President Bush to hire and fire federal prosecutors at whim, but said he was "not going to get into" why the White House didn't want officials testifying in public or under oath.
An official close to the committees said members fear any back-door testimony would be distorted by the White House's spin operation.
Snow indicated the White House would fight Congress on the subpoenas. But when asked if the administration would take lawmakers to court over the matter, Snow replied that it was "way premature" to say.
In a letter dated June 7 and released by Leahy's office today, current White House counsel Fred Fielding sought to head off the chairmen's subpoena threats.
"We think that the committees' suggested next steps in this matter must be fairly assessed against the backdrop of the extraordinary access acquired to date and the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing by White House officials," Fielding wrote. Indeed, even the most vocal critics of the firings admit that there is probably no criminal element in the scandal.
But those increasingly bipartisan critics also contend that the months-long stretch of hearings and document-gathering is all to the good of restoring DOJ's "integrity." To many Democrats, that endeavor requires the removal of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, but an attempt to pass a no-confidence resolution on Gonzales failed Monday.
Both Leahy and Conyers once again dismissed Fielding's offer to allow them to interview top current and former White House officials off the record.
"The White House's continued stonewalling leads to the obvious conclusion that the White House is hiding the truth because there is something to hide," Leahy wrote in a reply to Fielding today.
Conyers said, "Let me be clear: this subpoena is not a request, it is a demand on behalf of the American people for the White House to make available the documents and individuals we are requesting to help us answer the questions that remain.
The Bush administration has already promised to invoke executive privilege should any of its officials be called to testify. The big prize for both committees is Karl Rove, the White House's chief policy guru whose fingerprints are suspected in the firings. But the prospect of overcoming White House resistance to allowing Rove to appear before Congress is quite slim.
Calling on former White House officials to testify is murkier territory. The closest the committees have come to what they believe is the power center of the politically tinged firings is Monica Goodling, a top aide to Gonzales who resigned in April as lawmakers were calling on her to testify.
(Gonzales, of course, has testified, but to almost no one's satisfaction.)
Goodling eventually did testify, on May 23, but only after independently receiving immunity from DOJ. It's much more likely that the White House will intervene on both Miers' and Taylor's behalf, due to their one-time place in the administration's inner circle.
The 7,000-plus pages of documents and hours of testimony clocked before the committees reveal that Miers first approached DOJ in February 2005 about firing all 93 federal prosecutors. That idea was rejected, but put in motion the process that eventually led to the abrupt firing of one U.S. attorney on June 5, 2006, and seven more on Dec. 7, 2006.
More recently released evidence indicates Taylor played a direct role in efforts to install a Rove associate, Tim Griffin, into the Arkansas prosecutor's office. And in an e-mail sent on her RNC account, Taylor lashed out at a DOJ official for testifying that former U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins was not removed because of performance, but so Griffin could take his place.
In the caustic e-mail, Taylor accuses Cummins of being "lazy." That characterization contradicts what DOJ has had to say about him. "I'm sure I have some faults, but my work ethic hasn't been one of them," Cummins told AP.
(White House photo by Paul Morse)
Posted at 5:23 PM
Posted to:
Alberto Gonzales, Attorney Scandal, Bush Administration, Karl Rove, President Bush, Tony Snow
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