It's Bush's Way Or The (Hell) Highway

From Stranger at Blah3:

One step closer to Constitutional Crisis. They ain't budging.

White House Counsel Fred Fielding, in a letter today, told Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, that the White House has not budged in its refusal to allow the panels to question several White House aides, including Karl Rove, about what they know regarding the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys, moving the two sides closer to a constitutional battle over the scandal.

Fielding also appears to be trying to head off an attempt by Conyers to obtain e-mails and documents from the Republican National Committee regarding the firings. Roughly 50 White House officials, including 22 curent aides, used e-mail accounts controlled by the RNC to send messages, including some related to the prosecutor firings, and Conyers asked RNC Chairman Mike Duncan to turn over those records today.

Fielding also said that "it was and remains our intention to collect e-mails and documents from those accounts as well as the official White House e-mail and document retention systems" as part of a broader deal with the two committees on staffer testimony.

Fielding has offered to allow Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and other Bush aides to be questioned by committee investigators, but only behind closed doors, and not under oath. Fielding also won't allow any transcript of those interviews to be made. Conyers and Leahy have rejected the offer as woefully inadequate, and while both committees have authorized subpoenas for Rove, Miers and the others, only Conyers has issued up until now and those were for documents only.

Presidential temper tantrum?

Perhaps Bush's Monica Has No Right To Invoke The Fifth Amendment

For the past two weeks, there has been much talk that Monica Goodling, the holier-than-thou Department of (In)Justice lawyer who thinks she sits at the right hand of God and Bush, can/cannot invoke her 5th amendment right against self-incrimination AND keep her job. But Democrats now question whether she has any right to invoke the 5th at all.

From TPM Muckraker:

But in the letter today from committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and subcommittee Chair Linda Sanchez (D-CA), they wrote that Democrats weren't convinced that Goodling was invoking the Fifth for valid reasons. Goodling's lawyer John Dowd had cited earlier comments by Democrats to show that they had "reached conclusions" about the matter under investigation.

Conyers and Sanchez aren't buying it. "The fact that a few Senators and Members of the House have expressed publicly their doubts about the credibility of the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General in their representations to Congress about the U.S. Attorneys' termination does not in any way excuse your client from answering questions honestly and to the best of her ability," they wrote.

I'm with the Dems. Monica gets no "get out of jail free" card by invoking protection for herself she would grant to no one else.

Let this Monica "go down", but in a less pleasant way than Lewinsky.