Bush puts lawyers in key White House jobs
The president is hiring a fourth associate counsel, a White House spokeswoman said.
BALTIMORE SUN
WASHINGTON -- President Bush is preparing for what could be an onslaught of investigations by the new Democratic-led Congress by hiring lawyers to fill key White House posts.
Anticipating countless document requests and possible subpoenas, Bush is moving quickly to fill vacancies within his stable of lawyers. White House officials, though, say there are no plans to drastically expand the legal staff to deal with a flood of oversight.
"No, at this point, no," Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said recently. "We'll have to see what happens."
In the days after the midterm election, the White House announced that Bush had hired two replacements to plug holes in his counsel's office, including one lawyer, Christopher G. Oprison, who is a specialist in handling white-collar investigations.
A third hire was securities law specialist Paul R. Eckert, whose duties include dealing with the Office of the Special Counsel. Bush is in the process of hiring a fourth associate counsel, said Emily A. Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman.
"Obviously, if we do have investigations, we'll have to make sure we have enough people to be prepared to answer questions that come our way," Lawrimore said. "As of right now, I wouldn't say it's anything special."
Republicans close to Bush say any such moves would not come until the White House sees how aggressive Democrats are in trying to pry the lid off the inner workings of the administration.
"They just think it's inevitable that there will be some investigations that will tie up some time and attention," said Charles Black, a strategist with close ties to the White House. But there's no panic in the ranks of Bush's team, he added. "They don't think they have anything to hide."
Why the rush?
Bush must do what he can now -- before Democrats take over the majority in Congress next month -- to prepare, legal specialists say.
"At a time like this, the experienced people in the White House view themselves as in a race they hope to win, of organizing and coordinating their defenses to have them in place in time to slow down or resist oversight before the oversight can get organized," said Charles Tiefer of the University of Baltimore Law School, a former House counsel and veteran of congressional investigations.
Veterans of investigative battles between the White House and Congress predict that Bush ultimately will need to add staff members -- or at least borrow some from government agencies -- to contend with Democrats with subpoena power on Capitol Hill.
"Like any White House that has to deal with a Congress run by the other party, this White House has to bulk up its staff to deal with the inevitable flood of subpoenas. They're also going to have to coordinate with lots of friends and supporters," said Mark Corallo, a former top Republican aide to the House committee that issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to the camp of President Clinton.
Corallo and Barbara Comstock, another Republican public-relations executive with broad experience in Hill investigations, are launching a crisis-communications company to serve officials and corporations who, Corallo said, could end up as "drive-by victims" in a new round of probes.
Snow said the company is "certainly independent of the White House."
What's expected
Democrats are reluctant to reveal their investigative plans, but they have made it plain that they want to conduct more oversight of the Bush administration. Bush will need "people who have experience in responding to subpoenas, overseeing document production and preparing witnesses," said Amy R. Sabrin, who defended several Clinton administration officials during the 1990s.
The president might want to launch internal investigations, legal experts and analysts say, to turn up anything untoward before Democrats do. Some suggested that the administration was doing that last month when the Justice Department announced that it would look into the use of information gleaned from the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program, an investigation that Bush thwarted earlier by refusing to grant security clearances.
"It's quite common that a White House, anticipating congressional investigations, will prefer to let previously blocked internal administrative investigations go ahead as a preferred alternative way of trying to deprive the upcoming congressional investigation of exciting things to discover," Tiefer said.
White House adviser Black noted that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been careful to guard executive secrecy, a stance that is unlikely to change in the face of new congressional zeal for information.