White House aides under probe

WASHINGTON – The White House offered Tuesday to make political strategist Karl Rove and former counsel Harriet Miers available for congressional interviews – but not testimony under oath – in the investigation of the firing of eight federal prosecutors.\nSen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he would still press for White House aides to testify under oath but that White House counsel Fred Fielding “indicated he didn’t want to negotiate” whether Rove and others would have to appear in a full hearing. “That doesn’t mean we’re not going to try,” Schumer said.\nThe White House move was announced after the Senate voted overwhelmingly to end the Bush administration’s ability to unilaterally fill U.S. attorney vacancies. That had come as a backlash to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of the prosecutors.\nGonzales got a morale boost with an early-morning call from President Bush, their first conversation since a week ago when the president said he was unhappy with how the Justice Department handled the firings.\nThe White House said Bush planned a statement late Tuesday afternoon upon his return from a trip to Kansas City, Kansas.\nWhile some lawmakers have called for Gonzales to resign, Bush intended to make a statement of support for him to remain as attorney general, the White House said. The president was also to talk about his position on the offer made to Congress, a subject on which he feels strongly.\nThe White House offered to arrange interviews with Rove, Miers, deputy White House counsel William Kelley and J. Scott Jennings, a deputy to White House political director Sara Taylor, who works for Rove.\n“Such interviews would be private and conducted without the need for an oath, transcript, subsequent testimony or the subsequent issuance of subpoenas,” Fielding said in a letter to the chairman of the House and Senate judiciary committees.\nIn the letter, Fielding said more than 3,000 documents released by the Justice Department “do not reflect that any U.S. attorney was replaced to interfere with a pending or future criminal investigation or for any other improper reason.”\nSchumer said, “It’s sort of giving us the opportunity to talk to them but not giving us the opportunity to figure out what really happened here.”