Ashcroft's High Profile, Motives Raise White House Concerns
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 17, 2002; Page A04
The series of dire announcements last Monday about the alleged "dirty bomb" plot began, as these things often do, with Attorney General John D. Ashcroft.
Peering grimly into a Russian camera and bathed in an eerie red glow, Ashcroft broke away from meetings in Moscow to announce that the United States had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot" that could have caused "mass death and injury."
Only after Ashcroft's initial statement did Americans learn that Jose Padilla, arrested on May 8, was alleged to be merely in the initial planning stages of a plot and would not be charged with any crime. His research on radiological weapons, U.S. officials said, consisted largely of surfing the Internet.
The handling of the announcement earned Ashcroft a rare rebuke in the form of leaks from the White House -- where surprised aides viewed his remarks as alarmist -- and crystallized an issue that has simmered for months in the Bush administration and the Justice Department:
Is Ashcroft's profile too high?
"The idea has been for the attorney general to be the bull's-eye for the administration, where he's doing things for the administration and he's willing to take the heat," said an administration official. "But the complaint is that he tends to announce every little thing. . . . It's not clear anymore whether that should continue."
In the Bush administration's war on terrorism, Ashcroft has served as the de facto minister of fear, issuing dire warnings of terrorist threats and announcing stringent new security measures with whirlwind frequency. At the same time, the former senator from Missouri and onetime presidential candidate has taken the time to visit cities from Pittsburgh to Phoenix, where he supports local efforts against terrorism or announces the latest crime initiative.
With such visibility comes the credit for the successes of the war on terror, and the political hits for controversial new policies that some say restrict civil liberties.
He has announced most of the key Justice Department terror prosecutions since Sept. 11, including actions against suspected 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui and John Walker Lindh, who is charged with conspiracy to kill Americans as a Taliban combatant. In the last two weeks alone, Ashcroft unveiled rules rolling back decades-old restrictions on FBI spying and launched a secretive program to fingerprint and catalogue about 100,000 visa holders.
"He's basically been the heat shield for the administration," said Jeff Lungren, spokesman for House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.).
But Ashcroft's consistently high visibility, from news conferences on C-SPAN to regular appearances on "Larry King Live," has increasingly troubled some aides in the White House and other parts of the administration, who fear the attorney general is stealing attention from President Bush, several sources said.
His profile has been the subject of sometimes heated debate within the administration, those sources said, with some arguing that Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge or FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III should take more of the spotlight. Even within the Justice Department, some officials have advocated a lower profile for the attorney general.
"I think he will come to the conclusion," a White House official said last week, "that he doesn't need to be making every announcement."
Ashcroft's visibility has also fed speculation, denied by his aides, that he is eyeing another run for office.
Added to the mix is Ashcroft's controversial political history, which has provided ammunition to Democrats and civil liberties advocates who argue that the administration has played politics with aspects of the terrorism war.
"He's so fearless with the political rhetoric that he forgets he's the nation's chief law enforcement officer," said Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way and one of Ashcroft's most outspoken detractors in Washington. "If there's anybody who should speak in calm and reassuring terms, it should be John Ashcroft. But he doesn't get that."
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Ashcroft is in "a tricky position."
"You're bearing news on a fairly regular basis that is going to raise hackles and bring a bad reaction, especially when you come to it as somebody whose confirmation was so contentious," Ornstein said.
But in the Padilla case, he added, "there's no question that Ashcroft went too far in the claims he made and the way he made them. It runs the risk of damaging the credibility of the whole administration and the president."
In his first months in office, after bitterly contentious confirmation hearings in January 2001, Ashcroft mostly laid low.
A deeply conservative Republican, Ashcroft was portrayed by advocacy groups and Democrats as an antiabortion and pro-gun extremist with a record of racial insensitivity. His early public appearances on civil rights, the environment and other issues were aimed in part at softening that image, even as he made conservative policy decisions on guns and other issues in private.
The Sept. 11 attacks changed the strategy. Emboldened by a cause and focused on preventing further assaults, Ashcroft became perhaps the most visible face of the federal government's domestic reaction to the al Qaeda hijackings, presiding over almost daily briefings on the Sept. 11 probe and leading the drive to enact new anti-terrorism legislation.
He also served as a cudgel to complainers in Congress, suggesting to the Senate Judiciary Committee in December that those who criticized administration policies were aiding the terrorist cause.
Ashcroft's schedule has not been confined to terrorism. He has spoken in front of conservative religious groups. He also has participated in news conferences about criminal cases of local, rather than national, interest, including an April event announcing a drug bust in Pennsylvania.
"You want to use the attorney general for announcements that are truly worthy of that office," said a former high-ranking Justice official. "You don't want to have the attorney general get out there as often as he's been out there, because it generates the kind of questions now being asked: What is the motive behind this appearance?"
Consider one week in Ashcroft's schedule: On Tuesday, April 16, he held a news conference decrying a Supreme Court ruling on child pornography and joined Bush in endorsing a crime victims constitutional amendment.
Wednesday brought an appearance with the immigration commissioner to announce border reforms. That Friday, Ashcroft posed for photographs in Washington with the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, then jetted to Pittsburgh in the afternoon for the drug-bust announcement. Only reports of a terrorist threat to U.S. banks kept Ashcroft from leaving the next day for Russia.
That trip was postponed until this month, which led to the Moscow announcement of Padilla's arrest. A U.S. citizen who allegedly met with senior al Qaeda leaders overseas, Padilla has not been charged with a crime but has been transferred to military custody.
White House officials, who prize discretion and loyalty to Bush, typically review both the substance and form of high-profile announcements from Cabinet departments. They said they were taken by surprise at the way the Padilla case was handled. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz appeared to play down some aspects of the Ashcroft statement. "We didn't even know that Ashcroft was going to make the announcement that way," a senior administration official said.
Another White House official said frustration around the West Wing last week was aimed more at the Justice Department than at the attorney general personally.
"The most common phrase around here was, 'What were they thinking?' " the official said. "It seems he was not well served. It didn't demonstrate the best judgment. It would have been more than appropriate to have that announcement made back in Washington."
Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said that Padilla was a "very dangerous man" and that Ashcroft and other administration officials "did their best to share important information with the public about the threat posed by an al Qaeda operative." She pointed out that White House spokesman Ari Fleischer publicly supported the way the announcement was handled.
Victoria Toensing, a Washington lawyer and former Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration, said the complaints about the Padilla case are unfair.
"Can you imagine the criticism if he had not told us about the arrest of somebody who wanted to potentially detonate a bomb in Washington, D.C.?" Toensing said. "But now they're criticizing him for doing just that. . . . This is a case where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, so you might as well go ahead and do the right thing."
Underlying much of the grumbling over Ashcroft's profile are questions about his motives. His elevated stature has kept alive speculation that Ashcroft, a former senator, governor, state attorney general and presidential hopeful, might be weighing another run for political office.
His aides have repeatedly dismissed speculation that Ashcroft is aiming for the presidency or vice presidency, or that he would like to recapture the Senate seat he lost in 2000 to the widow of Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, who was killed in a plane crash shortly before the election.
On his most recent appearance with Larry King, Ashcroft called his current job "a great opportunity" but conceded that he missed the "camaraderie" of being a senator.
"I miss the people of the Senate," Ashcroft said. "Obviously, I've had some hard knocks from senators, but they're great people in the United States Senate."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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