Legal News

House Committee, Led by Pelosi, Files Suit Against Former Bush Staffers

By Dan Slater

We’re going to take a brief mid-day pause from SpitzerGate to give you a an updated summary of the battle on Capitol Hill between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats and AG Michael Mukasey’s DOJ. The latest, a lawsuit! First, the background:

On February 28: Pelosi asked the DOJ to open a grand jury investigation and pursue misdemeanor charges against Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and Joshua Bolten, President Bush’s chief-of-staff, for contempt of Congress. Miers refused to testify to Congress regarding the dismissals of federal prosecutors in 2006. Bolten failed to turn over White House documents related to the dismissals. Pelosi gave the DOJ one week to respond and said refusal to take the matter to a grand jury would result in the House’s filing of a civil lawsuit against the Bush administration. (John Boehner, the House Republican leader, said, “This sort of pandering to the left-wing fever swamps of loony liberal activists does nothing to make America safer.”)

February 29: Mukasey rejected referring the House’s contempt citations to a federal grand jury, saying Bolten and Miers had committed no crime. Mukasey said they were right in refusing to provide Congress with White House documents or to testify about the firings of federal prosecutors.

Yesterday: The House Judiciary Committee asked Federal District Court Judge John Bates to force Miers and Bolten to provide information about the dismissals. According to this NYT report, the suit says neither Miers nor Bolten may avoid the subpoenas by citing executive privilege, the doctrine that allows advisers’ advice to the president to remain confidential.

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, denounced the suit as “partisan theater,” the reports says. “The confidentiality that the president receives from his senior advisers and the constitutional principle of separation of powers must be protected from overreaching, and we are confident that the courts will agree with us.”

Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said, “We will not allow the administration to steamroll Congress.” He added, “The administration’s extreme claim to be immune from the oversight processes are at odds with our constitutional principles.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 11, 2008 (boomark / email).