President goes on the offensive over firing issue

Bush said he would challenge any subpoena of his top aides.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON -- A defiant President Bush vowed Tuesday to fight any effort by Congress to compel the testimony of top White House advisers about the firing of federal prosecutors, setting up a potential constitutional showdown and the first major direct confrontation with the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill.
The president also defended embattled Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales and accused Democrats more broadly of trying to score "political points" rather than "gather facts" over the dismissal last year of eight United States attorneys. He offered instead to release all White House communications related to the issue and to allow the aides to be interviewed privately but not under oath, a proposal that Democrats rejected.
"There is no indication that anybody did anything improper," the president said in a brief statement in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. "We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants."
Challenging subpoenas
The president said he would challenge in court any subpoena of his top aides. After days of limited comment, Bush moved to take the offensive on the issue at a time when his popularity is near all-time lows.
Democratic leaders said they would press ahead with plans to subpoena Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and others.
The White House's offer to let Rove and others answer congressional questions "doesn't do the job of figuring out what happened," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Fred Fielding, the president's general counsel, said the White House is attempting to fully cooperate, explaining in a letter to congressional leaders that "the president must remain faithful to the fundamental interests of the presidency and the requirements of the constitutional separation of powers."
At the same time, Fielding wrote, more than 3,000 pages of documents delivered to Capitol Hill by the Justice Department this week "do not reflect that any U.S. attorney was replaced to interfere with a pending or future criminal investigation."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., complaining that the Justice Department has provided conflicting stories about the prosecutors' firings, said: "If Karl Rove plans to tell the truth, he has nothing to fear from being under oath like any other witness."
Supporting Gonzales
The threat of subpoenas isn't the only political fire the White House is attempting to dampen. With Democratic leaders, and some Republicans, calling for Gonzales' resignation, Bush had telephoned his attorney general, his longtime friend from Texas, shortly after dawn Tuesday with "a very strong vote of confidence."
"He's got support with me. I support the attorney general," the president said later at the White House.
The massive document delivery from the Justice Department to Congress sheds little new light on the controversy. But it provided a window on behind-the-scenes confrontations between some of the prosecutors who would eventually be fired and critics in Congress and the department, as well as a taste of the human cost of the upheaval.
In an Aug. 31, 2006 e-mail, for example, Brent Ward, the head of a Justice Department anti-pornography task force complained to a Justice colleague he had "sat in a meeting with [prosecutor] Paul Charlton in Phoenix and heard him thumb his nose at us" with a reluctance to take on obscenity cases. Ward also complained about another fired prosecutor, Daniel Bogden, of Nevada.
Seven of the eight prosecutors were fired Dec. 7, while the eighth, Bud Cummins, of Arkansas, resigned in June and was replaced by a prot & eacute;g & eacute; of Rove.