Some Democrats in Congress don’t want to let George W. Bush leave town.
They want to continue investigating alleged wrongdoing by former administration officials like Karl Rove just as President Obama is urging them to turn the page.
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House Judiciary Committee Democrats have a long bill of particulars. They want to force Bush-era officials to testify about the firing of nine U.S. attorneys and alleged politicization of law enforcement. They want to press inquiries into Bush’s program of warrantless wiretaps and into allegations that suspected terrorists were tortured in U.S. custody or turned over to other countries for such mistreatment.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who leads the Judiciary Committee, has called for a “truth and reconciliation commission” to investigate such Bush administration tactics.
So far, Obama hasn’t endorsed the probes.
“I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards,” the president said, in telling reporters Feb. 9 that he would examine Leahy’s proposal. “My general orientation is to say, ‘Let’s get it right moving forward.’ ”
The first opportunity for an intraparty clash among Democrats may be over a subpoena of Rove, the man who helped guide Bush’s political fortunes. The House Judiciary Committee wants to ask Rove his possible role in firing U.S. attorneys.
No stonewalling
“We are going to finish the investigation we started,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who heads a Judiciary subcommittee on constitutional rights. “The committee can’t allow any administration to just stonewall, run out the clock and say goodbye.”
The possibility of criminal prosecutions may spark the type of partisan bickering Obama wants to avoid.
Eric Holder, Obama’s new attorney general, assured Republicans at his Senate confirmation hearing that he isn’t planning a wholesale criminal investigation of current or former government officials, though he wouldn’t rule out going after lawbreakers.
There won’t be any attempt to “criminalize policy differences” with the Bush administration, he said.
Obama, in his first days in office, ordered the closing within a year of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for suspected terrorists in Cuba and banned U.S. intelligence agencies from using the harshest interrogation techniques.
Sept. 11 responses
That isn’t enough for some Democrats who want to probe the Bush administration’s responses to the Sept. 11 attacks that reset the rules for counterterrorism.
Leahy said his proposed truth commission would help get to the bottom of how the previous administration authorized and employed such tactics as waterboarding, the interrogation technique used by the Central Intelligence Agency to simulate drowning.
Obama’s Justice Department angered civil liberties groups this month when it sided with the Bush administration and invoked the so-called state-secrets doctrine to try to block a lawsuit accusing a Boeing Co. unit of helping the CIA deliver terrorist suspects to be tortured in foreign countries.
Within days, lawmakers proposed legislation to give courts more power to review such secrecy claims.
Pressure from human rights groups for a full accounting of the government’s terrorist detention and interrogation programs may sharpen differences between Congress and the president.
