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It’s Subpoena Time

For months, senators have
listened to a parade of well-coached Justice Department witnesses
claiming to know nothing about how nine prosecutors were chosen for
firing. This week, it was the turn of Bradley Schlozman, a former
federal attorney in Missouri, to be uninformative and not credible. It
is time for Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, to deliver subpoenas that have been approved for Karl Rove,
former White House counsel Harriet Miers and their top aides, and to
make them testify in public and under oath.

Mr. Schlozman was appointed United States attorney in Missouri while
the state was in the midst of a hard-fought Senate race. In his brief
stint, he pushed a lawsuit, which was thrown out by a federal judge,
that could have led to thousands of Democratic-leaning voters being
wrongly purged from the rolls. Just days before the election, he
indicted voter registration workers from the liberal group Acorn on
fraud charges. Republicans quickly made the indictments an issue in the
Senate race.

Mr. Schlozman said it did not occur to him that the indictments
could affect the campaign. That is hard to believe since the Justice
Department’s guidelines tell prosecutors not to bring vote fraud
investigations right before an election, so as not to affect the
outcome. He also claimed, laughably, that he did not know that Acorn
was a liberal-leaning group.

Mr. Schlozman fits neatly into the larger picture. Prosecutors who
refused to use their offices to help Republicans win elections, like
John McKay in Washington State, and David Iglesias in New Mexico, were
fired. Prosecutors who used their offices to help Republicans did well.

Congress has now heard from everyone in the Justice Department who
appears to have played a significant role in the firings of the
prosecutors. They have all insisted that the actual decisions about
whom to fire came from somewhere else. It is increasingly clear that
the somewhere else was the White House. If Congress is going to get to
the bottom of the scandal, it has to get the testimony of Mr. Rove, his
aides Scott Jennings and Sara Taylor, Ms. Miers and her deputy, William
Kelley.

The White House has offered to make them available only if they do
not take an oath and there is no transcript. Those conditions are a
formula for condoning perjury, and they are unacceptable. As for
documents, the White House has released piles of useless e-mail
messages. But it has reported that key e-mails to and from Mr. Rove
were inexplicably destroyed. At the same time, it has argued that
e-mails of Mr. Rove’s that were kept on a Republican Party
computer system, which may contain critical information, should not be
released.

This noncooperation has gone on long enough. Mr. Leahy should
deliver the subpoenas for the five White House officials and make clear
that if the administration resists, Congress will use all available
means to get the information it needs.

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