Citing executive privilege, President Bush on Thursday refused to turn over documents related to the firing of federal prosecutors, prompting a Democratic lawmaker to accuse him of “Nixonian stonewalling.”
“We are forced down this unfortunate path which we sought to avoid,” White House counsel Fred Fielding wrote in a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees. “We had hoped this matter could conclude with your committees receiving information in lieu of having to invoke executive privilege.”
Fielding refused to give the Democrats documents concerning former Bush counsel Harriet Miers and former White House political director Sara Taylor. Democrats are trying to determine how much the two ex-aides knew about the Justice Department’s plan to fire eight federal prosecutors.
“This is a further shift by the Bush administration into Nixonian stonewalling,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. “Increasingly, the president and vice president feel they are above the law.”
House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said the president had “an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.”
But Fielding said the Bush administration had already turned over 8,500 pages of documents to Congress and allowed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to be questioned under oath. The White House also offered to let lawmakers question Miers, Taylor and Karl Rove, Bush’s top political strategist, if the sessions were conducted behind closed doors and not transcribed.
That offer was rejected by Democrats, whose subpoenas were dismissed by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow as “showmanship.”
“Members of Congress here are engaged in an attempt – apparently since they have been unsuccessful in passing key legislation – to try to do what they can to make life difficult for the White House,” Snow told reporters aboard Air Force One. “It also may explain why this is the least popular Congress in decades, because you do have what appears to be a strategy of destruction, rather than cooperation.”
It was not immediately clear whether the constitutional conflict would result in contempt proceedings by Congress or a court fight.
In 1998, President Bill Clinton invoked executive privilege in an attempt to prevent aides from testifying in the Monica Lewinsky investigation. A federal judge rejected Clinton’s claim, making him the first president since Richard Nixon to lose a court case over executive privilege.
