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To get at truth, put them under oath

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published March 22, 2007

President Bush seems to be inviting a constitutional confrontation with Congress over whether Karl Rove and Harriet Miers will testify in public and under oath before congressional committees on the politically motivated firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The House Judiciary Subcommittee voted Wednesday to issue subpoenas for Rove, the president's chief political adviser, and Miers, the former White House counsel. The Senate is expected to follow suit today. E-mail exchanges suggest that both top presidential advisers were involved in the firings. For Congress to get to the bottom of the matter, lawmakers need to question both Rove and Miers under oath.

However, the president is suggesting that the administration will defy the congressionally issued subpoenas, claiming a most elastic defense of "executive privilege." This is no surprise. This president has routinely put secrecy above the public's right to know. And Bush has routinely asserted executive power that he does not have.

Congress is a coequal branch of government and has a duty to investigate wrongdoing by the executive branch. There is good reason to suspect that some of the U.S. attorneys who were let go were targeted because they had not used their office to advance a partisan agenda. The public is well served by Congress delving into whether the Bush administration abused its power and obstructed justice by firing select federal prosecutors because they failed to indict Democratic officials or too aggressively pursued corruption by Republicans.

The president's offer to allow Rove and Miers to speak to congressional committees in private, without being sworn in and without a transcript of the testimony, is unacceptable. The only reason to avoid taking an oath is to avoid telling the truth, and the lack of an official transcript suggests that the White House wants to be able to cook up its own version of what was said after the fact.

The president has suggested that executive privilege protects the secrecy of every conversation and e-mail exchanged within the White House. It is once again a historic overreach. While the courts have recognized that the president has some interest in receiving confidential advice, there is plenty that Rove and Miers can testify to that does not directly implicate their advice to the president. It should be remembered that many high-level Clinton-era advisers testified in public and under oath before Congress.

Moreover, when the public interest in disclosure is strong, as in a case like this involving potential obstruction of justice, then assertions of executive privilege should fail. Even President Nixon wasn't able to keep the Watergate tapes secret, even though they laid bare very sensitive Oval Office conversations between the president and his closest advisers.

As the probe into the U.S. attorney firings has advanced, it has found evidence that politics, not performance, was the primary issue in a number of the cases. This is not a "partisan fishing expedition," as the president has claimed. It is a Democratic-controlled Congress exercising its oversight responsibilities, something the previous Republican majority refused to do.

[Last modified March 21, 2007, 23:12:38]