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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (257711)	5/22/2002 5:16:49 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Congress Subpoenas White House Contacts on Enron By Mike Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, May 22, 2002; 1:08 PM A Senate committee, spurred on by accusations from Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) that the White House was slow-walking or even stonewalling a request for records about Enron Corp., voted today to issue the first congressional subpoenas on the Bush administration. The 9-to-8 vote by the Senate Governmental Affairs committee broke along party lines. The White House, which received the committee's request seven weeks ago, said before the vote that it would begin providing documents later today, leading to accusations by Republicans that Lieberman, the committee chairman and a prospective presidential candidate, was showboating. The committee has been seeking records of White House contacts with Enron, which filed for bankruptcy in the biggest corporate collapse in American history, and with the federal agencies responsible for regulating it. The White House sent a survey about Enron communications to 204 of the 2,000 employees in the Executive Office of the President, which Lieberman called a sign that the administration had no intention of responding fully. Lieberman, briefly thumping the hearing-room table with his right fist, said the White House response over the past seven weeks has "frustrated the committee's work and exhausted my patience." He asserted that the committee was "being slow-walked at least and stonewalled at worst." "No White House can be immune from congressional oversight," Lieberman said. "I have tried patiently for two months to work with this White House, but we can wait no longer." A senior administration official said the White House planned to send the committee information later today about interviews conducted with what the administration has called the small percentage of aides who said in response to the survey that they had contacts or might have had contacts with Enron. White House officials have acknowledged that for reasons of precedent and to protect the president's prerogatives, they wanted to provoke a court fight with the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, over its demand for records of Vice President Cheney's energy task force. But these officials said they wanted to work with Lieberman and were trying to meet his demands. Anne Womack, a White House spokeswoman, said: "Senator Lieberman's subpoena, passed on a party-line vote, is unnecessary and we are perplexed that he's chosen to pursue this confrontational approach rather than work cooperatively with the White House." Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.), the committee's ranking minority member, said he opposed issuing the subpoenas in part because the White House "did not regulate Enron's business in any way and it was not responsible for regulating Enron's energy business." "Our congressional power to inquire is based on our having some legitimate legislative purpose," Thompson said. "It appears that this is nothing more than a desire to have a look-see to see if possibly something might turn up." The 105-minute debate briefly turned bitter when Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) said the breadth of the request, which he said could result in more records than the committee could handle "makes me very suspicious about the motivation." Lieberman, his voice rising in the ornate committee chamber in Dirksen Senate Office Building, replied with apparent anger, "I take some of your remarks to be personal." He called them unwarranted and unfair. "I am making no accusation about the conduct of anyone in the White House," Lieberman said. Thompson noted that the White House had been given only "seven weeks, with a president who's fighting a war." Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) objected to what he called "the wartime White House defense." Referring to other congressional inquiries resisted by the White House, Durbin said, "We're told, 'We're in a war. We don't have time to answer those questions.'‚" Lieberman issued a seven-page subpoena to the Executive Office of the President and a similar one to the Office of the Vice President. He said that was at the request of the administration, which said the offices' records have separate custodians. © 2002 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com