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Posted by Laura at March 14, 2007 09:36 PM...The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote Thursday on subpoenas to force testimony from Rove and other White House officials if they refuse to submit to voluntary interviews about their roles in the firings. White House counsel Fred Fielding met with lawmakers behind closed doors Wednesday to try to avoid a legal showdown, with no conclusive outcome.
Fielding said he hopes to decide by Friday what documents to turn over to Congress and whether the White House will assert executive privilege to try to shield Bush's advisers from answering questions.
"Frankly, I don't care whether he says he's going to allow people (to testify) or not. We'll subpoena the people we want," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN.
Leahy, a former Vermont prosecutor, scoffed at Bush's assurances that politics played no role in the firings.
"We're finding more and more evidence of political manipulation of prosecutors," he said. "Everybody knows there's politics involved."
In an interview Wednesday, Cummins questioned whether the Justice Department seriously evaluated any of the other U.S. attorneys who they insisted were removed for performance reasons.
"If they had serious questions, where are the memos proving there was a real performance review?" he asked. "They released all of these embarrassing memos, don't you think they would have released the paper trail?"
Cummins also said that e-mails released by the White House earlier this week demonstrated that performance wasn't the issue. "It's clear that, in at least some instances, politics played a significant part," he said. ...