Friday, March 16, 2007

MS. IFILL: The politics of disclosure, payback at the Justice Department, congressional willpower on Iraq, and what we've learned about the origins of 9/11, tonight on "Washington Week."

ATTORNEY GENERAL ALBERTO GONZALES: I acknowledge that mistakes were made here.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Mistakes were made, and I'm frankly not happy about them.

MS. IFILL: But the president is standing by his man, and in the face of some pretty tough evidence that the attorney general's closest aid played high-stakes politics with the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (D-NY): Kyle Samson will not become the next Scooter Libby - the next fall guy.

MS. IFILL: What is Congress prepared to do? Can Alberto Gonzales survive? And after another week of debate on Iraq, what is Congress prepared to do about the war: talk or act?

SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN (D-DE): This is about the mission. Mr. President, you're leading us off a cliff. Stop!

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): Passage would be absolutely fatal to our mission.

MS. IFILL: Plus, was this man the brains behind it all: 9/11, the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 2002 bombings in Bali, the murder of Daniel Pearl. He says so. We look at what that means with the reporters covering the week: Alexis Simendinger of National Journal, Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times, and Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times.

ANNOUNCER: Live from our nation's capital, this is "Washington Week with Gwen Ifill," produced in association with "National Journal."

ANNOUNCER: Once again, live from Washington, moderator Gwen Ifill.

MS. IFILL: Good evening. Closing the loop - that's what we will try to do tonight by focusing on three stories that consumed Washington this week. The White House struggled to defend its top Justice Department official against charges that Justice misled Congress about efforts to fire eight politically unpalatable prosecutors.

SEN. SCHUMER: Every time new information comes out, it proves that the White House was not telling the truth in their previous statements.

REP. JAMES SENSENBRENNER (R-WI): The attorney general has gotten himself in deep trouble by having a different story come out of the Justice Department abut every second news cycle.

MS. IFILL: That drama played out as the House and the Senate debated different plans to reduce the U.S. presence in Iraq. Republicans won the day in the Senate:

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ): Some argue that Iraq is already a catastrophe and we need to get our soldiers out of the way of its consequences. To my colleagues who believe this I say you have no idea how much worse things could get.

MS. IFILL: In the House of Representatives, Democrats prevailed.

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA) [House Speaker]: Any military engagement, we believe, must be judged on three counts: whether it makes our country safer, our military stronger, and the region more stable. The war in Iraq fails on all three counts.

MS. IFILL: And then there was the fallout from the startling and expansive confession from a terrorist mastermind. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed took credit for 31 separate plots including the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl. Each of these events contain the potential for ripple effects that will extent far beyond this week.

On the prosecutor story, we wait tonight to see who will be called to the Hill to explain, and what they will say. Wishful Democrats are focusing on Karl Rove.

KARL ROVE [White House Political Advisor]: This, to my mind, is a lot of politics. And I understand that's what Congress has a right to play around with, and they're going to do it. And I just ask the American people and ask Congress to look fairly and carefully at what's being said and done there.

MS. IFILL: We begin at the White House. What ripple effects are we seeing at the White House from this fallout of the prosecutor story, Alexis?

MS. SIMENDINGER: I think, Gwen, some of the biggest ones that we've seen this week, the ones that are most prominent are - first of all, this was a story - story line, a set of facts, that the administration was very eager to leave at the door of the Justice Department and not have come to the doorstep of the president of the United States. And it came directly to him this week because the Justice Department with White House supervision turned over a whole set of e-mails. That in itself is a brand new day. We used to call those document dumps when President Clinton had to do those things with oversight.

The other thing is we say the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, hanging on to his job, to some extent some members are saying by a thread - both Republicans and Democrats looking at him right now with an eye to - asking whether he has the credibility to run the Justice Department. The other element of it is that right away members of Congress are going to change the law back to where it was before they inserted the provision last year into the Patriot Act to let the attorney general have these U.S. attorneys appointed by him without Senate confirmation. That could happen right away. And then in addition we have all these members of Congress who are upset at a time when the president really is trying to push his domestic agenda, and they're upset about their home state attorneys or appointments being in some way questioned as political fodder for the president.

MS. IFILL: That's a lot of ripples. Okay. We're going to get back to all of them. I want to go the Hill for a moment, Jeff, because there was a ripple effect this week also on the House deciding to move forward on limiting the war in Iraq, and the Senate deciding maybe not so much.

MR. ZELENY: Yes, but there was a similarity between the two. For the first time, both chambers on either side of the Capitol were debating a plan to set a specific timetable to bring the troops home. It prevailed in the House where the rules are simpler, through committee, and the full House will vote on this next week. But even in the Senate, where the rules are more complicated, the Democrats still largely held together, with the exception of two Democrats, in voting for legislation that would set an end date - a goal of March 31st, 2008. It did not pass the Senate. The Republicans also held together to defeat it, but it was a marker that was set down that we'll see a lot more to come in the coming weeks as they debate the war funding, which is coming up next week.

MS. IFILL: And, Doyle, we heard this spectacular confection from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. My question was what did we learn that we didn't know, really, before?

MR. MCMANUS: Well, in fact we learned a lot of new allegations, not a lot of new hard information. I mean he was the mastermind - the acknowledged mastermind of al Qaeda, the guy who actually put the operations together, asserting that he was the architect of more than 30 plots, some that occurred, like 9/11 or the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - that may have been an exaggeration on his part; some that didn't occur, like blowing up the Empire State Building, Big Ben, the Panama Canal.

To tie it to the rest of the week, though, the funny thing is this was a ripple effect that didn't happen. And I think it's in a way a reminder of how weakened President Bush's position is and how the country in a sense has moved on from the framework of the war on terror that was, of course, the main theme of his presidency from 2001 through the 2004 election. Well, here was this extraordinarily sensational set of allegations. The man said he was planning to assassinate Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and it was kind of a one-day story.

MS. IFILL: Did that not catch fire because people didn't believe him or because people thought they knew all these already or because there were just other things going on?

MR. MCMANUS: I think it was because there were just other things - well, it was a little bit of all of those, but in the largest sense it should have been a reminder that we are still a country at war with al Qaeda, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in a sense, the most interesting part of what he did was he seized the opportunity to make a great big speech. This was a hearing about whether he was an enemy combatant or not, and by the end of it he said, heck yes, I'm an enemy combatant and here are the reasons why. He made a kind of a tub-thumping speech to the Muslim people of the world that al Qaeda is trying to reach out to, so he kind of tried to turn it to his own advantage. But in the United States, we've almost forgotten that we're in a war on terror because we've got these other issues going on.

MS. IFILL: Well, let's talk about those issues a little bit because one of the issues, of course, is the Iraq war debate, which the president insists is about the war on terror. But the thing that's kept him so preoccupied this week is the fate of his good friend Al Gonzales.

MS. SIMENDINGER: The judge.

MS. IFILL: Is the judge, is the attorney general, as we speak tonight here - Friday night in Washington - is he going to survive? Is there any sign that erosion is happening?

MS. SIMENDINGER: Well, the information on the Hill from Republicans - a few Republicans; we're talking about a handful at this point - there are members who are now saying both privately and publicly that they really, truly question whether Judge Gonzales - he used to be a judge in Texas - has the credibility to run the Justice Department, or the competency. And they're in a way publicly advising the president to think about letting him go and cutting him loose.

The White House is deliberating about the whole question of whether Gonzales could testify, which he has said he will do and the president instructed him to do. Go back to the Hill and make this right, is what the president told him to do. And whether he can actually dot that - and Gonzales has said that he will. He will appear again before Congress, and he's made is possible - he says made it possible for five members of the Justice Department political team to do the same thing.

MS. IFILL: Well, you've been up on the Hill this week, Jeff, and to the naked eye it looks like if not only are some Republicans jumping off the Gonzales bandwagon, but a whole lot more are not saying anything at all.

MR. ZELENY: That's right. It was hard to actually ascertain the opinion of many Republican senators. You'd walk up to them in a hallway and say "What do you think about the attorney general? Should he stay or not?" They almost wanted to run the other way or talk about Iraq, which is something many of them have not wanted to do for a long time.

MS. IFILL: That's interesting.

MR. ZELENY: But Senator John Sununu from New Hampshire was out front saying he has lost the confidence of the attorney general. In some respects this is exactly what some of these senators have been looking for: a distraction from the Iraq debate. Some of these Republican senators have been aligned with the administration on this, and this gave Senator Sununu something else to talk about.

But I was talking to John Warner, the senior senator from Virginia, just this afternoon, and he said I think we should wait and see what happens on the testimony on the Hill. So there's not a complete to rush to judgment, but I think it's coming.

MS. SIMENDINGER: Well, it became a GOP talking point. Let's wait and see where the facts go. So they're trying to buy some time, I think.

MR. MCMANUS: And it isn't a flood yet, but let's remember that John Sununu is running for reelection in a year and a half, the second Republican senator who came out and said we need a new attorney general was Gordon Smith of Oregon. He is running. I think the canaries in the mineshaft here are going to be some of those other marginal Republican senators like Norm Coleman of Minnesota or Olympia Snowe - she's not very marginal, but she's one who might move from main. And you're right: that hasn't quite happened yet.

MS. IFILL: Is the White -

MR. ZELENY: In fact, I tried to ask Norm Coleman the question and the elevator was opening up. He ran inside and did not want to answer that question, so I think some of them are trying to figure out exactly what to do.

MS. IFILL: We love when they hide inside the elevators. It's our favorite moment, especially when we're on the other side pounding.

But, Alexis, the White House seemed to be not very surefooted in its response to this. We saw the president's defense of Al Gonzales, which was not the most full throated, even though he didn't seem to be backing away. We did see them say we think this was Harriet Miers who dreamed this all up, which seemed kind of unusual - the former White House counsel - and then today they said, well, maybe it wasn't. And then we heard Karl Rove saying it's all politics. Is the White House not getting its act together in this response?

MS. SIMENDINGER: This is one of the most poorly handled, poorly conceived, most mixed up, muddled crisis communications management situations that you've seen. When you think about it as being in their own best interest, and the fact that their claim is that everything they did was legal. This is not about whether the president had the authority to do this - that no one did anything illegal. This is about now it's turned into poor management, bad misinformation, testifying incorrectly or in a misleading fashion, and then potentially covering it up.

MS. IFILL: And how different is it now on Capitol Hill that Democrats have subpoena power and things like this?

MS. SIMENDINGER: It's huge.

MS. IFILL: Yes?

MS. SIMENDINGER: Absolutely huge.

MR. ZELENY: And you hear the Democrats walking around, finally able to actually do something. The oversight committee is always full, the committee room seems like it's always full now. And Congressman Rahm Emanuel and Senator Chuck Schumer have been talking about this issue since early January. And this has sort of been a slow boil. But to the subpoena power is very huge, and you'll hear Senator Leahy saying that he'll be doing this, and Senator Specter is not standing in his way in the Judiciary Committee in the Senate. So I think this is a key difference for Democrats and it's almost - it makes all the difference in the world on the Hill that the Democrats are now in charge.

MS. IFILL: Well, we saw Valerie Plame up there today.

One more question for you, Doyle, on this point, which is there has been much back and forth about whether this is something which is unprecedented - this firing. Whether it is okay for the president to do it, because after all, as Tony Snow said repeatedly today, these people serve at the pleasure of the president. Is there a precedent for it?

MR. MCMANUS: Well, there is and there isn't. This one of those awful things where you go back into the history and everybody is still arguing about what the history means. Look, it's always been a bit of a tradition that when the White House changes in party, when Richard Nixon was succeeded by - who was that? No, that was Gerald Ford. When Gerald Ford was succeeded by Jimmy Carter, when Bill Clinton was succeeded by - when Clinton took over, and when President Bush took over from Clinton, at that point it's pretty much costmary for the U.S. attorneys in place to submit their resignations. Now, Republicans are arguing that Janet Reno under Bill Clinton went farther and demanded the resignations, but even then Bill Clinton didn't fire everybody.

This is different. It's in the middle of a term. It's within the president's right to do it. That's technically true. But what even some conservative Republican legal specialists are worried about is this: are we sliding toward a politicization of that job of U.S. attorney? There's always been politics involved. Senators get involved. But are we sliding towards - and that was what was, of course, ugly in those e-mails.

MS. SIMENDINGER: Yes. And I think we should add, too, that we're talking about eight individuals who were appointed - politically appointed by the president of the United States. They were chosen by this president, so we're not talking about him being concerned about Democratic holdovers or some other president's choices. We're talking about his own choices.

MR. MCMANUS: These are Republicans, yes.

MS. SIMENDINGER: And the idea of swooping in at the beginning of his second term and then measuring them, which is what the e-mails show - measuring their talents or loyalties - is new.

MR. ZELENY: I think if we think back to what was going on at that point after the 2004 election, the president came out and said I have all the political capital in the world, I'm going to spend it. So that was the mindset at this point, and then from there it went. Of all the press conferences that I went to this week on the Hill, of all the senators I've talked to, the most interesting one I found was Senator John Ensign of Nevada. He's the Republican - he's the chairman of the Republican Senatorial Committee. He sort of walked sheepishly into the room where there were press conferences and said, "I'm not so sure I should be here. I thought long and hard about it, but I need to stand up for my federal prosecutor, and I think politics were involved in this."

MS. IFILL: Who was one of the eight fired.

MR. ZELENY: He was one of the eight. So here's the person who's in charge of the Republican efforts to win back seats in the Senate who's basically speaking out against his president. That's something we don't see very often.

MS. IFILL: Let's talk about something else we don't see very often and which you've been witnessing this week, which is this Iraq war debate. It took the Senate weeks to get its act together to get enough votes to even have the debate, and in the end the Democrats still couldn't get the voted they needed - the 60 votes they needed to get this passed. What happened?

MR. ZELENY: There ahs been a debate over having the debate for so long that people on both sides got a little apprehensive about this, Republicans and then -

MS. IFILL: And a little fatigued, too, I'll bet.

MR. ZELENY: Exactly. Republicans have been accused of blocking the debate. And finally, some Republican senators were like, look, we should just have this debate. Let's not stand in the way. It's one thing the minority party can do in the Senate is block a debate. The Democrats at the same time, because of their rules, were not allowing some of these amendments to go forward. So both sides really thought it was in their best interest to have the debate. The Democrats knew they were not going to win. Senator Harry Reid - he new he didn't have the 60 votes.

But what it does is set a marker. For the first time, it gets all Democrats on record - almost all, with the exception of Mark Pryor from Arkansas and Ben Nelson from Nebraska, who sided with Republicans. It's a benchmark as they go forward. This is a much different place than only a few months ago. In fact, last year, only 13 Democrats voted for setting a timetable, so it's inch by inch here as they go forward.

MS. IFILL: The president seemed to win this week was in being able to say this is really about micromanaging my ability to do this. Let's listen to what he had to say last night speaking to a pretty friendly Republican audience.

PRES. BUSH: Next week the House will begin debate on an emergency war spending bill. Now, some in the Congress are using this bill as an opportunity to micromanage our military commanders or to force a precipitous withdrawal in Iraq or threaten vital funding for Iraqi security forces and fund projects that have nothing to do with the war on terror. I believe the members of Congress are sincere when they say they support our troops, and now is the time for them to show that support.

MS. IFILL: So, Alexis, is the president willing to veto this bill if it were to actually get out of the House and Senate?

MS. SIMENDINGER: He has issued a veto threat and he's going to continue doing that this weekend. His attitude is I want a stripped down, clean bill - supplemental spending bill that I've asked for. What I asked for is what I want to get. And he is trying to encourage members to think long and hard about adding the sweeteners, which on the House side they've done, and is trying to exploit what happened in the Senate as kind of a warning about what could happen in the House. And if they go in this direction, that they - I don't know if everyone remembers the sensation of the House moving first. We call the being BTUed and having the Senate go in a different direction and the House members being nervous about a vote they may cast, and then end up finding out that it doesn't go anywhere.

MS. IFILL: Doyle, how much are the Democrats between a rock and hard place between the centrists in the party and the liberals in the party, who - the liberals who don't think they've done enough, and the centrist who are trying to cobble out a middle of the -

MR. MCMANUS: Well, they are in exactly that squeeze. And even some of the liberals, like David Obey of Wisconsin, are complaining about the unremitting pressure of the Democratic base on them to get the troops out now, to cut the funding, to put the restrictions on. So every Democrat has to wrestle with that right now.

In a larger sense, this debate is about who gets to frame the question, like so many debates. President Bush is trying to say, do you support the troops or don't you? So that's why he wants that stripped down appropriation. Are you going to send them the money or aren't you?

The Democrats are trying to frame this as, are we stuck in there indefinitely, forever or do we get to put any time limit on it? And polls have shown that the idea of a time limit actually gets a good healthy minority from the American public. And you're going to continue to hear both sides talk kind of past each other.

MS. IFILL: The other thing polls show in which the administration has been so successful before is linking this to the war on terror. And so we see this big confession, which you pointed out, didn't get much ripple effect, you see that they're trying to make a case there - a pretty complicated case for making - for holding him as an enemy combatant, not really trying him for the crime, at least not so far. What do we know about that process and whether it's going to have any kind of lingering effect in the American psyche - this whole idea of holding people without -

MR. MCMANUS: Holding people indefinitely.

MS. IFILL: Right.

MR. MCMANUS: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan four years ago. This is the first public statement he's been able to make after four years of detention, interrogation, he says, torture, and this is sort of the first surfacing into what would look like a normal legal proceeding. Actually, the transcript is wonderful. You can get it on the Defense Department website. It's 26 pages long. It's a military judge and this arch-terrorist being very polite to each other. It's almost surreal. There's a point at which the judge says, well, can we move ahead on this point? And Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of September 11th says, and I quote in English, "Okay by me."

MS. IFILL: Okay by me. Well shocking as this may seem, we're actually done. We are all out of time. You guys, however, have done a really good job of summing up a really complicated week. Thank you very much for your coverage. Thank you all for your coverage of an eventful week.

We have to leave you a few minutes early one more time this week, so you can take advantage of the opportunity to support your local public television station, which in turn supports us. Keep up on every little thing every night on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." Also, I'll be online this Thursday at noon to take your questions for my monthly webchat. Be kind. We look forward to hearing from you, and we will see you again next week on "Washington Week." Have a great St. Patrick's Day and good night.