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Bush’s hard but brittle line

By Sean Aqui | Related entries in Breaking News, General Politics, Law, News

President Bush has offered to make his senior aides available to Congressional investigators in the prosecutor case — but not under oath, and with no transcripts.

Bush said his White House counsel, Fred Fielding, told lawmakers they could interview presidential counselor Karl Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and their deputies Ã¢â‚¬â€? but only on the president’s terms: in private, “without the need for an oath” and without a transcript.

The president cast the offer as virtually unprecedented and a reasonable way for Congress to get all the information it needs about the matter.

“If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed,” Bush said. “If scoring political points is the desire, then the rejection of this reasonable proposal will really be evident for the American people to see.”

“Reasonable”? Maybe. On the one hand, the demand that there be no oath sounds like more than it is: the aides would still be legally required to tell the truth. But the request for no transcripts is an odd one. Are investigators supposed to put a report together from memory? Why is Bush so adamant that there be no record of the conversations? Is this just more knee-jerk secrecy from the administration that redefined obsessive secrecy?

Reject the offer, Bush warned, and it would provoke a Constitutional showdown. He’s right about that: it’s unclear just what power Congress has — or should have — to subpoena senior members of the executive branch.

(continued over at Midtopia)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 and is filed under Breaking News, General Politics, Law, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Bush’s hard but brittle line”

bob in fl Says:
March 20th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
I may be mistaken on this one, but I believe the Supreme Court ruled in the Nixon case that Executive Privilege is limited to matters of national security.. Like you, I believe Congress has the upper hand on this one

Wouldn’t it be interesting if Karl & Harriet plead the Fifth Amendment?

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