WASHINGTON — Senators launched a long-awaited debate Wednesday on John R. Bolton's hotly contested nomination as U.N. ambassador, with Democrats leveling a new charge in a last-ditch effort to defeat him.
The start of the debate signaled the final stage of the fierce, 2 1/2 -month partisan struggle over President Bush's most controversial foreign policy nominee.
Senate Republicans said they hoped to close the debate and vote on Bolton's nomination today.
But Democrats were considering whether to refuse to end the debate -- a tactic that could threaten a truce reached days earlier on the use of the filibuster.
Confirmation of the conservative, blunt-spoken State Department official seemed assured, though Democrats could succeed in delaying the vote until after next week's congressional break.
For more than a month, Bolton has faced a rigorous congressional investigation into allegations that he sought to manipulate intelligence and bullied analysts who disagreed with him. His nomination was so controversial that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee forwarded it to the full Senate without a recommendation that he be approved.
In the allegation against Bolton made Wednesday, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said that Bolton might have mishandled U.S. intelligence material.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said that Bolton appeared to have shared information about a National Security Agency electronic intercept with another State Department official "without required NSA approval."
The agency had directed that "no further action be taken on this information without [its] prior approval," Rockefeller said in a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, adding that he was "troubled" by the allegation.
Rockefeller's letter came after a two-week review by the Intelligence Committee's staff of Bolton's requests to see communications intercepted by the giant eavesdropping agency. He recommended that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee interview Bolton to find out whether he had shared the information with others as well.
Some Democrats reiterated complaints that they could not judge the issue properly while the administration refuses to provide classified documents.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) said that a delay in the vote would be a protest against the administration's failure to share information, and not an attempt at filibuster.
