...Part 3 of 4--SNOW: Well, Senator Rockefeller said that there's nothing partisan about this; they're examining the legal options.
ROBERTS: Legal options? Read the memo. "Pull the trigger"? "Castigate the majority"? "Wait till next year"? It really prejudges the whole inquiry. It says that we're guilty until proven innocent, in regards to the use of the memo.
We are about 90 percent done, and for this to -- and we have worked very hard to get all the documents from State and from the Department of Defense and from the White House, who is now working in a spirit of cooperation.
Now we have this very partisan attack memo laying out there, with some members of the Senate actually embracing it, reveling in it. They are destroying the nonpartisan history of this committee, as described by Senator Kerry.
That really bothers me, not so much because it's personal -- I felt a sense of personal outrage about it -- but when you are the chairman of the committee, you have to try to pull together and work together because of the responsibility of the committee and how important it is to national security.
SNOW: Do you believe it is going to be possible to work with the Democrats on the committee to complete the job in a manner you see...
ROBERTS: It's up to them.
SNOW: ... proper?
ROBERTS: It's up to them. I hope so. It's up to them
SNOW: You said last week, "We face mounting intelligence challenges in places like North Korea, Iran and, of course, Iraq and Afghanistan. Members across the aisle should carefully reflect and decide whether their caucus should repudiate this plan and embrace our nation's security instead of their political self-interest."
Now, it's interesting, you talk about the intelligence challenges, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has now shut down the committee for the time being.
ROBERTS: We're going to do the reauthorization part of it. That there's any agenda that would pop up that would be terribly important, we'd have to focus on that. But the regular -- all the regular meetings that we have of the committee -- I can tell you, my Republican colleagues on that committee are outraged.
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