Bush Aides Called to Testify Over Prosecutor Sackings

Congressional Democrats today set up a showdown with the White House as a panel approved subpoenas for George Bush's top political adviser and other White House aides, over the firings of eight prosecutors.

The House judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law approved, but has not issued, subpoenas for Karl Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers, their deputies, and Kyle Sampson, a top justice department official, who resigned over the scandal last week.

The full judiciary committee would authorise the subpoenas if its chairman, John Conyers, chose to do so.

The White House has refused to budge in the controversy, standing by the embattled attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, and insisting that the prosecutors were mainly fired on grounds of competence.

But Democrats say they were fired for political reasons, including failing to pursue enthusiastically enough alleged Democratic election abuses.

Correspondence released earlier this month between the justice department and the White House appeared to back the Democrats. The letters showed that Mr Rove, as early as January 6 2005, wondered whether all 93 US attorneys should all be replaced at the start of Mr Bush's second term.

Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican former chairman of the judiciary committee, appealed for pragmatism. "It is more important to get the information promptly than to have months or years of litigation," he said.

Patrick Leahy, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said "testimony should be on the record and under oath."

If neither side backs down, the dispute could end in court - ultimately the supreme court - in a politically messy development that would prolong what Mr Bush called the "public spectacle" of the firings, and public vilifications, of the eight US attorneys.

The row comes in a month in which Mr Bush has been weakened by further drops in his public approval ratings and in support for the war in Iraq. He was not helped by a jury in Washington that found a former senior White House aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, guilty of perjury.

In a sign of loss of support for Mr Gonzales, among Republicans as well as Democrats, the senate voted overwhelmingly yesterday to end the Bush administration's power to appoint prosecutors on its own.

The Senate passed a bill by 94 to two that overturned a provision in the Patriot Act that gave Mr Bush the power.

The White House today said it would resist the subpoenas.