White House, Congress so far refuse to blink

Leahy says White House can’t be trusted
Sampson’s e-mail was included in a “document dump” of more than 3,000 pieces of paper and electronic correspondence the Justice Department delivered to the House subcommittee Monday night. As House staffers and reporters sifted through them Tuesday and Wednesday, they turned up contradictions to the Justice Department’s account of the dismissals.

Leahy, Conyers and other Democrats contended that the paper trial so far indicated widespread deception by the Justice Department.

“I believe there is even more to come out,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a member of Leahy’s committee. “And I think it’s our duty to bring that out.”

Leahy said the only way to do that was to hear from White House aides under oath. But Bush’s offer would not even allow transcripts to be made of their interviews.

“We’ve had a number of these private meetings where they’ve come up and they’ve met with a few members of the Senate and the House and said, ‘Here, we’ve given you the whole story,’” Leahy said. “Two days later, we pick up the newspaper and find they’ve left out half of it, and then they call up and say, ‘Oops.’”

In one exchange that is likely to be closely examined, e-mail messages showed that Gonzales was considering whether to fire some prosecutors as early as January 2005, when he was Bush’s chief counsel.

Other messages from the same period show that Sampson was already at work on trying to remove as many as 20 percent of prosecutors whom he deemed not to be “loyal Bushies.” Rove, meanwhile, was making inquiries about whether all 93 U.S. attorneys could be dismissed.

Sampson replied that firing all of the prosecutors would meet great resistance on Capitol Hill. “That said, if Karl thinks there would be political will to do it, then so do I,” he wrote.

By last December, Sampson, by then chief of staff to Gonzales, who had become attorney general, was schooling Miers at the White House in how to defend the dismissals. The e-mail was titled “Prepare to Withstand Political Upheaval.”

Gonzales on the hot seat
The confrontation has led to calls from many Democrats and even some Republicans for the removal of Gonzales, whom they accuse of having compromised the Justice Department’s independence from politics and of having needlessly trashed the eight prosecutors’ reputations in defending their dismissals.

Gonzales apologized to the fired prosecutors after the Justice Department documents revealed the political underpinnings of the plan, but some of them are seeking positive steps to repair their reputations.

David Iglesias, who claimed he was fired as the U.S. attorney in New Mexico for not yielding to Republican pressure to quicken his investigation of alleged Democratic vote fraud, wrote Wednesday in The New York Times that he wanted a written retraction from the Justice Department to set the record straight about why he was fired.

For now, Bush remains in his old friend’s corner.

“He’s got support with me,” Bush said Tuesday. “I support the attorney general.”

Less clear is how much resolution either side could get from a court battle, Pete Williams, NBC News’ Justice Department correspondent, reported Wednesday. If the House does seek legal sanctions, it would have to do so through the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who would be asked, in essence, to prosecute his bosses for contempt of Congress.

Moreover, the courts are historically reluctant to referee disputes between what they have traditionally called the “political branches,” Williams said.

“If you look back through history,” he said, “someone usually makes an accommodation before it comes to trial.”

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