Saturday, April 21, 2007
Waxman Ready To Issue Subpoenas
Funny, but I don't recall this kind of thing happening to the Bush administration when the GOP controlled Congress.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) sought yesterday to pressure the Bush administration into divulging sensitive policy information, scheduling a committee vote for Wednesday on his plan to issue four subpoenas for the information.
In letters to officials at the White House, the Republican National Committee and the State Department, Waxman wrote that he scheduled the vote because he has not received documents and testimony needed for the committee's wide-ranging investigations. ...
One letter reiterated Waxman's request for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to appear before his committee. He said Rice has repeatedly failed to explain what she knew about Iraq's alleged interest in buying uranium from Niger before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Waxman said he wants to examine how White House officials such as Rice, then national security adviser, used intelligence on Iraq, given what he described as Rice's erroneous statement in June 2003 that "no one . . . in our circles" was aware that the Niger evidence was based on forged foreign documents. ...
In a separate letter to White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, Waxman complained that the White House has not set a timetable for responding to his request for information about a 2002 White House contract with a company called MZM, whose president at the time, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty last year to bribery and election contribution fraud.
And Waxman reiterated to former White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. that he expects him to appear at a hearing about the leak of information about Valerie Plame's employment at the CIA. ...
Finally, Waxman wrote Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan that the House committee plans to subpoena "a limited set of e-mails related to whether Bush Administration officials have used federal resources to help Republican political candidates."
