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Why Not Under Oath?

The House Judiciary subcommittee voted today to allow Democratic leaders to issue subpoenas to four administration officials, including Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, to solicit under oath testimony about the fired U.S. attorneys scandal. The president is not a fan of this option and will only allow the officials to speak if they are not under oath:

President Bush sought yesterday to defuse the controversy…while proposing to make Karl Rove and other top aides available for private interviews with congressional investigators.

The White House, however, limited the kinds of questions the aides would answer and said the interviews may not be conducted under oath or transcribed…

My immediate question is, if the president is comfortable with allowing these officials to speak in the form of a private interview while not under oath, what’s the rub with having them speak under oath while a transcript is recorded? What’s the difference between those two settings, one with no oath and no physical record of the conversation and the other with an oath and with such a record? It seems pretty clear to me. The president wants his officials to be able to lie with impunity.

What else could it be? What nuance am I missing here? The president’s defense is that it is an abuse of executive privilege to require testimony under oath by executive officials. I could understand that reason if the Congress was going willy nilly and demanding that executive officials spend huge amounts of their time on the Hill testifying for no reason. But we’re talking about a situation where the Department of Justice may have been obstructing justice in many ongoing investigations by the very prosecutors they fired:

On May 11, 2006, Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, sent a confidential E-mail to the White House counsel’s office…: “The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam,” Sampson wrote, “that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires.”

So what was the “real problem” that Sampson thought the administration had with Lam?

U.S. News has learned that on May 10, one day before Sampson’s E-mail to the White House counsel’s office, the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego alerted the Justice Department that the FBI would execute search warrants in two days for the No. 3 official at the CIA, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, in connection with the spiraling corruption probe into former Republican Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham of California.

Woah. One day Ms. Lam’s office notifies the Department of Justice they will be executing a search warrant on a CIA officials that is tied to the ongoing investigation of Republican Rep. Duke Cunningham, now a convicted felon, and the very next day the attorney general’s chief of staff send an email around saying Ms. Lam needs to be fired. This is by no means evidence of any wrong doing on the part of the Department of Justice, but I would argue it’s more than enough to warrant under oath questioning of any of the officials potentially involved to try to get to the bottom of what happened.

That’s why under oath testimony is required. What good is it if President Bush allows members of his administration to further mislead Congress on an issue that has clear legal ramifications? I think President Bush will be able to look safely back on his time in the White House and know he won’t be remembered as the president who ceded too much executive privilege while facing an aggressive legislative branch. Letting Karl Rove and Harriet Miers testify about this scandal won’t change that.