Democrats insisted on Thursday that Attorney General John Ashcroft remove himself from the investigation into the disclosure of an undercover CIA officer's identity, defying Republican efforts to contain the furor over the affair.
The clamor will probably be fed by financial data underscoring the close political ties between Ashcroft and Karl Rove, the presidential adviser whose role in the leak has come into question. Campaign finance data show that Rove's former company received more than US$300,000 from Ashcroft's 1994 Senate campaign in Missouri for direct-mail work and other services, and that he had also done work in two earlier Ashcroft campaigns.
"Does anyone really believe that this attorney general can with a straight face say they're going to investigate these people when they work for them, they have close ties?" Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa asked on the Senate floor on Thursday.
New York Democratoc Senator Charles Schumer said on Thursday that Ashcroft should recuse himself immediately. Schumer said three or four Republicans had come to him and said, "You guys are right on this issue."
Republicans in the House and Senate described the controversy as a "tempest in a teapot" and said Joseph Wilson IV, the former ambassador married to the officer whose identity was disclosed to the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, was beginning to be viewed as a partisan figure.
One senior Republican aide said that if the uproar did not abate, some Republicans were considering proposing that the White House allow the FBI director, Robert Mueller III, to appoint a prosecutor.
"The problem with Ashcroft is that he is not seen as an independent figure," the aide said.
Publicly, however, no Republicans have broken ranks with the White House and the Justice Department by calling for Ashcroft to recuse himself or appoint an outside counsel.
So much is riding on Republican unity that CNN caused a brief flurry on Thursday by reporting that Republican Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter had called on Ashcroft to recuse himself.
But the senator quickly put out a press release saying he had been misquoted and said later in an interview that the decision was best left to the attorney general. He said he was confident that career Justice Department lawyers could ably oversee the investigation.
The Republican chairmen of the intelligence committees in the House and the Senate said their panels were not pursuing the matter. The chairmen, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas and Representative Porter Goss of Florida, said their view -- based on limited knowledge -- was that the disclosure was inadvertent. However, both men said that if it turned out it had been calculated, they would treat it very seriously.
"I would say there is a much larger dose of partisan politics going on right now than there is worry about national security," said Goss, a former CIA agent. "But I would never take lightly a serious allegation backed up by evidence."
He added, referring to the inquiry by the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, into former President Clinton's behavior, "If somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I will have an investigation."
Three female Democratic senators raised furious objections to the disclosure of the name, saying that whoever had dragged Wilson's wife into a political dispute over his work on weapons of mass destruction had gone far beyond the accepted limits of partisan infighting.
"This betrayal by someone or some people in the administration has reached a new low by attacking the family of one of its own," said Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisianna.
"There's an unwritten rule in politics that no matter how rough the politics gets, families are off limits, particularly spouses and children," she said.
With interest in investigation intense, the FBI said on Thursday that it was developing a protocol to help ensure investigators access to witnesses and documents.
"There's a protocol we're developing on the way investigators will handle the interviews and the records and how we obtain those," said Susan Whitson, a spokeswoman for the FBI, which is leading the inquiry. "Our whole purpose here is get to the bottom of an unauthorized disclosure."
Whitson declined to discuss details, but current and former law enforcement officials said that from past experience they expected that gatekeepers at the White House and the CIA -- probably in the counsels' offices -- would act as a clearinghouse for interview and document requests.
In the White House, it was Alberto Gonzales, counsel to the president, who issued a staffwide directive this week that any records relevant to the investigation not be destroyed.
The CIA received similar instructions, and a government official disclosed on Thursday that the State Department and the Defense Department did as well.
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