Release of Terrorism Memos Angers Bush
WASHINGTON — In a rare rebuke, President Bush expressed disappointment at his own Justice Department on Thursday, suggesting that it had improperly injected partisan politics into the work of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks by releasing documents intended to raise questions about a Democratic panel member.
Bush expressed his displeasure at the start of a commission interview at the Oval Office. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney met with the 10-member commission for more than three hours.
Later in the day, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters about Bush's comments critical of the Justice Department.
Commission chairman Thomas H. Kean also said that Bush expressed those sentiments to the panel.
Bush "doesn't believe that there ought to be finger-pointing. We ought to all be working together to learn the lessons of Sept. 11," McClellan said.
The controversy involves commission member Jamie Gorelick, who was a deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration. Her role in federal counterterrorism efforts were scrutinized this month when Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, a former Republican senator from Missouri, declassified a 1995 memo and gave it to the Sept. 11 commission. The memo, written by Gorelick, instructed federal officials to keep counterintelligence "more clearly separate" from criminal intelligence.
That memo raised eyebrows because of a widely held belief after Sept. 11 that closer communication between the CIA and FBI was needed to combat terrorism -- and that the traditional "wall" between counterintelligence and criminal investigators was an impediment to thwarting terrorist attacks.
After Ashcroft released the memo, during his appearance before the commission, some Republican lawmakers, called on Gorelick to resign. She refused, and was strongly supported by Kean and other commissioners.
But on the eve of Thursday's joint Bush-Cheney session with the commission, the Justice Department released additional Gorelick-related memos, posting them on its website. The agency's action prompted Bush's remarks to the commission that he was "disappointed" in the Justice Department.
At a briefing, McClellan refused to specify how the White House conveyed the president's unhappiness to the Justice Department, saying only that the message had been delivered "at the staff level."
