With Democratic control of Congress comes subpoena power. And with subpoena power comes the need for the administration to hire a bunch of new lawyers. To some degree, this is not surprising. More requests for documents require more manhours to process. And that is how some friends of BushCo. are attempting to spin the hiring spree.
“It’s certainly not lost on them that there will be more investigative requests and more things for them to respond to, but I don’t think that you’re going to see any dramatic changes,” said Reginald Brown, a former associate in Bush’s White House counsel’s office who is now in private practice…
…”Like any White House that has to deal with a Congress run by the other party, this White House has to bulk up its staff to deal with the inevitable flood of subpoenas. They’re also going to have to coordinate with lots of friends and supporters,” said Mark Corallo, a former top Republican aide to the House committee that issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to the Clinton camp.
Even White House Press Secretary Tony Snow is spinning away.
“No, at this point, no,” Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said recently. “We’ll have to see what happens.”
Snow rebutted the notion that Bush is casting about for legal advice in the wake of his party’s loss of control of the Congress.
“We don’t have a war room set up where we’re … dialing the 800 numbers of law firms,” he said.
It sounds to me like the White House has a certain consciousness of guilt. My guess is that the administration is going to use a strategy of complying with lower level inquiries. If someone wants to know what a cabinet official was up to, they’ll turn that stuff over. But if Congress inquires into who met with or advised the President or Vice-President, they will exert executive privilege. They can run out the clock on the executive privilege stuff, but they are going to have their hands full dealing with accusations of corruption, especially in contracts assigned for Iraq and Katrina.
