March 18: Democrats target White House over firings
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said today that he would seek to subpoena senior White House officials, including chief political strategist Karl Rove, if they do not agree to testify in the expanding probe over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) suggested that only testimony under oath would be acceptable, rejecting any kind of private briefing with the White House.
Sen. Patrick Leahy on ABC's "This Week. (ABC via Getty Images)
The comments set up a potential clash this week between the White House and congressional Democrats over allegations that Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers and others orchestrated the firings of federal prosecutors for political reasons. The White House is expected to announce Tuesday whether they will be allowed to testify or whether they will claim executive privilege.
"I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this," Leahy said on ABC's "This Week." "I do not believe in this, we'll have a private briefing for you where we'll tell you everything, and they don't."
Senior Republicans on the Sunday shows were split over whether White House officials should testify before the committee. At Justice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has apologized for the handling of the attorney firings but rejected calls to step down.
Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he wants Rove and Miers to testify. But he said he is not yet in favor of subpoenaing them.
"I want to see exactly what the White House response is," Specter said on "Fox News Sunday." "Maybe the White House will come back and say, 'We'll permit them to be interviewed and we'll give them all the records.' "
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a committee member, warned that while he supported issuing subpoenas for Justice officials, trying to compel testimony by Rove or others in the White House could end up being a "political circus."
"I just want to be careful that we conduct a legitimate inquiry and we don't overstep into this sort of political witch hunt environment which I see us very close to getting into," he said on ABC.
Cornyn echoed GOP criticism that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has helped lead the investigation into the firings while using the issue to raise money for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which he chairs.
On NBC's "Meet the Press," Schumer responded: "This is much too serious to be about politics, and the bottom line is our committee is simply looking into the misdeeds in the executive branch, in the Justice Department, in the administration."
Schumer also said that Kyle Sampson, a chief of staff to Gonzales who resigned as a result of the controversy, is likely to testify before Congress.
Seven U.S. attorneys were fired Dec. 7, and another was let go months earlier. Justice Department officials initially said the dismissals were the result of poor performance by the attorneys. But the attorneys, several of whom were conducting investigations of public officials, had excellent job performance reviews.
Internal e-mails showed that White House officials had been discussing for two years firing U.S. attorneys, who serve at the pleasure of the president, and the administration had concerns that some were not aggressively pursuing White House priorities such as voter fraud and immigration cases.
Meantime, Sen. Pete Domeinci (R-N.M.) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) acknowledged contacting then-U.S. Attorney David C. Igelsias about an investigation into a Democratic official ahead of last November's midterm elections.
Speaking on Fox, Igelsias expressed frustration with the way he was treated.
IGLESIAS: Performance has nothing to do with this. This is a political hit. And I just wish the Justice Department would have been honest when it testified in January that these were, in fact, not performance related but, in fact, political. I think it's incredibly telling that I wasn't on any hit list until just weeks after those two very inappropriate phone calls from two members of Congress.
As several hosts pointed out, Gonzales declined requests to be interviewed on the shows.
War: Gates speaks
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made his debut on the Sunday shows as the fourth anniversary of the Iraq invasion (March 19, 2003) neared, saying the president's decision to send more than 20,000 combat troops to Iraq to pacify the country has worked out "so far so good."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates appears on CBS's "Face the Nation" (Face the Nation, Karin Cooper)
"The Iraqis are meeting the commitments that they have made to us," Gates said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
But Gates cautioned that final word on the "surge" might not come until this summer. The generals on the ground, he said, "warned that as the surge took place into Baghdad and as we cleared people from Baghdad, there would be kind of a squirting effect," where Al Qaeda and other insurgents find other places from which to attack.
Gates, who has been receiving positive reviews for his first months as defense secretary since taking over from Donald Rumsfeld, made a few other notable statements (and dodges):
· On whether Iraq is in civil war: "This Washington game of is it a civil war or isn't it, I think, is a problem. ... The reality is that stoking sectarian violence is a very specific strategy on the part of al Qaeda and the insurgents."
· On comments by Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that homosexual acts are immoral: "I think that this is an issue on which personal opinion really doesn't have a place. We have a don't ask, don't tell policy that is a law."
· On whether "don't ask, don't tell" should be the law: "I've got a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan, challenges in Iran and North Korea and elsewhere, global war on terror, three budget bills totaling $715 billion. I think I've got quite a lot on my plate.
· On why he writes personal statements to the families of fallen troops: "This is what I do, unfortunately, virtually every evening. ... It is a small gesture to the families that I personally am involved and that I personally very much care and have great sorrow over the sacrifice that their son or daughter or husband or wife has made. ... The bulk of the letter is a typed letter, but I always add three or four lines in of handwritten personal feelings at the end."
War: Democrats vs. the White House
White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley urged House Democrats not to go forward with a bill to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, pledging that the president would veto the legislation.
"Our plea is: Let's not go through this charade," he said on ABC. "The problem with that legislation is the arbitrariness of it. ... What we sent up as a bill to fund the troops is now a withdrawal of the troops bill. It sets these benchmarks for the Iraqis, but ... It says [that] whether or not the Iraqis meet the benchmarks, the troops are coming out, and the troops are coming out."
Democrats are trying to pass a bill that would set strict requirements on troop readiness, apply specific benchmarks for the Iraqi government and begin troop withdrawals within months.
The effort is being led by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), the chair of the appropriations defense subcommittee, who appeared on CNN's "Late Edition."
MURTHA: They've mismanaged this war. They talk about us micromanaging. They've mismanaged the war so badly, they put the commanders in impossible positions. ... The first step to redeploy .."On ABC, host George Stephanopoulos previewed a new poll done with the BBC and USA Today showing that less than half of Iraqis - 49 percent -- are confident in their government, while 51 percent aren't. And only 18 percent are confident in the U.S. and British forces in the country--while 82 percent aren't. "Can the mission succeed when so few Iraqis have confidence in those forces?" Stephanopoulos asked.
HADLEY: You have to ask the question, why don't they have that confidence? I think the answer is very clear: ... The presence of our forces and the presence of the Iraqi forces and the unity government has not yet brought security to the people of Iraq.
Hadley agreed with the assessment presented in The Washington Post that al Qaeda in Iraq doesn't pose the same kind of threat as the branch of the terrorist group that has operated out of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"Remember what the president said right after 9/11. We were going to go on the offense and take the enemies of America on overseas so we do not need to fight them at home," he said on CNN. "There is no doubt that al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq, if you listen to the statements of Zarqawi and his successor, they would like to be operating against America."
War: Iraq from many angles
One of the most unusual collections of political players assembled in recent memory was on NBC's "Meet the Press:" former majority leader Tom Delay (R-Tex.), who's touting his new book "No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight"; former representative Tom Andrews who is now directing Win Without War; Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterpris Institute who encouaged the ouster of Saddam Hussein; and Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), a former vice admiral in the Navy who was elected on an anti-Iraq war platform last November.
Host Tim Russert asked the four guests whether the Iraq war was "worth the cost in life and treasure?"
Delay began by saying "it's been four years since America has been attacked by these terrorists" - actually, five and a half - and continued: "We seem to forget that we are at war, and when you are at war, you've got to fight that war to win rather than fight the war for political posturing."
Andrews was startled by Delay's opening: "It's incredible to me to hear Mr. DeLay start his answer with your question by saying that we were attacked on 9/11 in answer to a question about Iraq. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11."
To Perle, Russert's question was off-base, so he posed his own question. "What is in our national interest now? What is going to make Americans safer?" Perle asked. "I disagree with what we've just heard -- a defeat in Iraq brought about, in the worse instance, by a precipitous withdrawal would have terrorists around the world celebrating."
Sestak chose to highlight his personal experience. "Tim, I was on the ground in Afghanistan two months after the war began over .... I saw what had to be done. ... I went back to Afghanistan on the ground 18 months later and saw what hadn't been done. As the general said to me, 'Joe, we've got our finger in the dike,'" because we had diverted our resources and our attention to Iraq, a tragic misadventure."
Sestak referenced a Middle Eastern expression - "enshala," meaning God willing tomorrow - to argue that the U.S. can't wait any longer for the Iraqis to show progress in quelling violence. "There's only one leverage left," he said -- withdrawal at a specified date.
Finally, Delay defended a recent column about congressmen advocating withdrawal in which he wrote, "Yes, I am questioning their patriotism."
On NBC, Delay elaborated, "Well, it is my opinion that when you go to war, we ought to all come together. You can debate going to war, that's a legitimate debate, but once you have our soldiers and our young people dying on the battlefield, we should come together, and we shouldn't have what we had yesterday on the mall in Washington, D.C."
By Zachary Goldfarb |
March 18, 2007; 3:52 PM ET
Previous: March 18 Preview: U.S. Attorney Firings |
Next: March 25 Preview: Congress, White House Clash Over Attorneys
Posted by: Anonymous | March 18, 2007 4:30 PM
Tom Delay is in no position to question the patriotism of any American. He, even more than the other America-hater, Bush, richly deserve our scorn. Nor is Delay qualified to talk about duty or honor, having evaded serving his nation in time of war, just as coward Bush and Cheney and Perle and Hadley so energetically did. The ruse that al-Queda will attack us at home is a empty threat and a non-issue -- we should fear the enemies within, which is to say, the Republican Party and their affiliated misfits and malingerers.
Posted by: Parakeeta Byrd | March 18, 2007 5:02 PM
That Tom Delay should get air time is a travesty. This administration and its bootlicking sycophants continuously, systematically, and maliciously lie about everything. Everything is a deceit and a lie. Everything is politically motivated and politically expedient to further their power grab. Why on earth should any human being believe anything they say? All this and meanwhile slapping the Bible and claiming moral high ground. It is disgusting and pathetic.
Posted by: Outraged | March 18, 2007 5:51 PM
Can't we just leave Tom Delay in the obscurity that he labored so hard to achieve and so richly deserves?
Shame on Meet the Press for providing this disgraced liar with the limelight he craves in order to peddle a book that even Newt Gingrich finds objectionable.
Posted by: Brent Mack | March 18, 2007 6:35 PM
Tom Delay -- Irrelevant Blowhard
Posted by: JDBrooks | March 18, 2007 6:37 PM
Tom Delay, who still faces criminal charges, shows by his Republican party affiliation why he always has made a living associating with vermin.
Posted by: mikeasr | March 18, 2007 8:06 PM
mikeasr, very good post.thanks
Posted by: doc | March 18, 2007 8:15 PM
Republicans open investigation for the Democrats plot and treason against the US Army. This is the first, the second will come soon.
Posted by: saeed tariq | March 18, 2007 9:12 PM
As a WWII twice wounded, decorated veteran, who gave up his college student draft exemption to enlist in the Cavalry, my patriotism and love of country cannot be questioned. As one who bled for, and loves his country, I am of the opinion that it is the duty of the Congress to set a date certain for withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, and to exercise the constitutional power of the purse to do so. We should start bringing our boys and girls home no later than September 1, 2008.
Posted by: Arthur Stanley Katz | March 18, 2007 11:22 PM
The way Delay couldn't engage in the conversation without interrupting was pretty hilarious. Little Russ won't be inviting him back again soon, I am fairly sure. It was really pretty surreal; Tom Delay and Richard Perle, both of whom have resigned in disgrace from the government positions from which they promoted this war, are now the A-team for the debate from the Republican side!?!? They can't even get any actual office-holders to step out and debate the war in public? Sestak and Andrews certainly held their own throughout this little circus, but it would have been better if Russ Feingold and Dennis Kucinich had gotten their teeth into Tom and Dick, no?
Posted by: jim preston | March 18, 2007 11:42 PM
Tom DeLay talking about patriotism is like Richard Perle talking about the national interest or George W. Bush talking about restoring honesty and integrity to the White House.
If the war is worth the sacrifice, send the Twins.
Posted by: Ed A | March 18, 2007 11:57 PM
I want to see Karl Rove come before the Senate Judiciary Committee to give his side of the story of the fired attornies. Karl really likes to hide behind others to hide his lack of an education. Karl only graduated from high school.
Harriet Miers name was thrown around earlier as the person responsible for the firings but this her name was discarded by Tony Snow because no one can recollect.
The justice department has brought fought documents for the firings. Lets see who was involve and why were those attornies fired.
Karl Rove, please come forth under oath to give your side of the story.
Posted by: Anne | March 19, 2007 2:14 AM
I found the comments made by DeLay to be a total rehash of what he said so long ago - when he was leader in the House. Somehow the troubles he has been through have not made him stop and think and decide that it is time for him to change, not expect everyone to change according to his wishes.
Ruth Beazer
Posted by: Ruth Beazer | March 19, 2007 3:35 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.
For a country with such a large fundamentalist religious population, ruled by such a gang of avowed people of faith, how ANY person appearing before any congressional committee on a weighty issue could not have to testify under oath says it all. You are ruled by charlatans, mountebanks and intolerant hucksters, liars all, perhaps their faith revealed by their willingness to lie, but not lie oath. Of course, its not perjury if its not under oath. And lies in camera never see the light of day, do they?