Something about a wall

06/15/2007

Editorial
Rutland Herald

Sen. Patrick Leahy stated it plainly. "The White House cannot have it both ways: It cannot stonewall congressional investigations by refusing to provide documents and witnesses, while claiming nothing improper occurred."

Leahy's statement came as the Senate Judiciary Committee and its House counterpart issued subpoenas demanding the testimony of Harriet Miers, former White House counsel, and Sara Taylor, former political director, about the firing of U.S. attorneys.

It was not by accident that Leahy's statement deployed the term "stonewall." The term became famous during the Watergate investigation when the White House tried everything possible to keep the press and the public from following the trail of evidence to the crimes of the Watergate scandal. (Another famous White House phrase, used to describe the partial release of information designed to put snoopy reporters off the scent, was the "modified, limited hangout.")

Reporters looking into Watergate noticed something about the stonewalling of the White House. White House denials were always cagey. They were never complete denials. Low-level operatives interviewed by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who uncovered the Watergate scandal, were shadowed by enormous fear.

What better example of stonewalling than the White House response to requests by Leahy and others to talk to Miers, Taylor and others? The White House said these high officials would talk to Congress but only privately and only if there was no transcript of their testimony. And their testimony would not be given under oath.

The White House called this offer cooperation. It seemed more like an effort to stonewall by means of the modified limited hangout.

It is interesting to note that the man who took the place of Harriet Miers as White House counsel is Fred Fielding, who was assistant to the White House counsel for President Nixon during Watergate. He is familiar with stonewalls and hangouts.

On the surface, the firings are not the same as a burglary. A burglary is a crime; the firing of prosecutors is within the powers of the president.

But Congress still has not gotten to the bottom of the firings. No one in the White House or Justice Department seems to remember who drew up the list of prosecutors to be fired or why individual prosecutors made the list. Originally, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others made false statements about the question — willfully false, which would make them liars, or accidentally false, which would make them incompetent. It seems Gonzales was not adept in the dark art of the stonewall.

It is apparent that Karl Rove and others in the White House were involved in the decisions to fire, and all signs point to a campaign by Rove to enlist the U.S. attorneys in a political war against Democratic congressional candidates. That is what we surmise by the pressure that appears to have been applied to prosecutors to mount investigations of Democrats and to go easy on Republicans.

That is not the way justice is supposed to work. It is good that Leahy has pushed ahead with his subpoenas. In time truth has a way of making even the most stout-seeming stone walls crumble to dust.

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