US President George W. Bush directed former aides to defy congressional subpoenas, claiming executive privilege and prodding lawmakers closer to their first contempt citations against administration officials since Ronald Reagan was president.
The latest power fight between the legislative and executive branches of the US government came as members of Congress returned from a holiday recess. An atmosphere of high tension accompanied the resumption of work on Monday as a fight also loomed between majority Democrats and some key Republicans and Bush over his Iraq war policy.
The probe into the US attorney firings, which were seen as political by Democrats and some Republicans, was only one of several Democratic-led investigations of the White House and its use of executive power spanning the war in Iraq, Bush's secretive wiretapping program and his commutation last week of the prison sentence of a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.
White House Counsel Fred Fielding insisted that Bush was acting in good faith in withholding documents and directing the two aides -- Fielding's predecessor, Harriet Miers, and Bush's former political director, Sara Taylor -- to defy subpoenas ordering them to explain their roles in the firings over the winter.
In the standoff between branches of government, Fielding renewed the White House offer to let Miers, Taylor and other administration officials meet with congressional investigators off the record and with no transcript. He declined to explain anew the legal underpinnings of the privilege claim as the chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees had directed.
Documented
"You may be assured that the president's assertion here comports with prior practices in similar contexts, and that it has been appropriately documented," Fielding wrote.
Democratic Representative John Conyers, chairman of the House panel, left little doubt where the showdown was headed.
"Contrary to what the White House may believe, it is the Congress and the courts that will decide whether an invocation of executive privilege is valid, not the White House unilaterally," he said.
Republican Senator Arlen Specter said the posturing was a waste of time and money and a distraction from the questions at hand: Who ordered the firings, why, and whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should continue to serve or be fired.
Specter, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Democrats' threat of taking the standoff to court on a contempt citation was spurious because the prosecutor who would consider it is a Bush appointee.
"On a case like this, does anyone believe the US attorney is going to bring a criminal contempt citation against anyone?" Specter said in a telephone interview. "The US attorney works for the president and it's a discretionary matter what the US attorney does."
Historically, such standoffs over executive privilege are resolved before the full House or Senate votes on referring a congressional contempt citation to the US attorney for the District of Columbia. But rather than cooling off over the July 4th Independence Day holiday, Bush and Democrats returned from the weeklong break closer to a legal confrontation.
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