White House will stall and stonewall and then Bush toadie Judge at the District Court will throw the whole thing out of court, providing Bush toadie DOJ even prosecutes the matter.
House Panel Votes for Contempt Charges in Firings Case
By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 25, 2007; 2:48 PM
The House Judiciary Committee voted today to issue contempt citations for two of President Bush's most trusted aides, taking its most dramatic step yet towards a constitutional showdown with the White House over the Justice Department's dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.
The panel voted 22-17, along party lines, to issue citations to Joshua B. Bolten, White House chief of staff, and Harriet E. Miers, former White House counsel. Both refused to comply with committee subpoenas after Bush declared that documents and testimony related to the prosecutor firings were protected by executive privilege.
"If we countenance a process where our subpoenas can be readily ignored, where a witness under a duly authorized subpoena doesn't even have to bother to show up . . . then we have already lost," committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) said before the vote. "We won't be able to get anybody in front of this committee or any other."
The vote represents the first overt step towards finding Bolten and Miers in criminal contempt of Congress. Next would come a vote of the entire House, followed by a referral to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
But the Bush administration has made clear it intends to block prosecution of any contempt charges, arguing that a presidentially-appointed U.S. attorney cannot legally be forced by Congress to flout the president's determination that the materials and testimony sought are protected by executive privilege.
White House spokesman Tony Snow responded with strong language.
"Now we have a situation where there is an attempt to do something that's never been done in American history, which is to assail the concept of executive privilege, which hails back to the administration of George Washington and in particular to use criminal contempt charges against the White House chief of staff and the White House legal counsel," he said.
Republicans on the panel argued strongly today against issuing contempt citations, and Democrats shot down two proposed GOP amendments before voting for the contempt findings.
"I believe this is an unnecessary provocation of a constitutional crisis," said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). "Absent showing that a crime was committed in this process, I think the White House is going to win an argument in court."
Sensenbrenner, the Judiciary panel's former chairman, said lawmakers would have a better chance by filing a lawsuit that challenged Bush's executive privilege claim, rather than pursuing contempt charges.
But Conyers responded that the administration had provoked the constitutional showdown. Democrats have rejected a proposal from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding to allow private, off-the-record interviews of presidential adviser Karl Rove and other aides about their roles in the removal of the prosecutors.
Contempt of Congress is a federal misdemeanor, punishable by as much as one year in prison and a $100,000 fine.
Brian A. Benczkowski, principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a letter to lawmakers Monday that the Justice Department had a long-standing position, "articulated during administrations of both parties, that the criminal contempt of Congress statute does not apply to the president or presidential subordinates who assert executive privilege."
The same assertion also applies to Miers, Benczkowski wrote.
Today's actions come after seven months of hearings and subpoenas in the investigation of last year's prosecutor firings. The dismissals culminated a two-year effort by the White House and Justice Department that targeted some U.S. attorneys for removal based in part on their perceived disloyalty to the Bush administration and GOP priorities.
Several of the fired prosecutors were improperly contacted by GOP lawmakers or staff about politically sensitive investigations. Democrats complain that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and others have not offered any reasonable explanations for why most of the nine prosecutors were removed.
More than a half dozen senior Justice Department officials have resigned during the investigation.
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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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