WASHINGTON — Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday defeated a Democratic push to investigate a domestic espionage operation authorized by President Bush, but pledged to increase scrutiny of the controversial program through a newly created subcommittee.
The developments enraged Democrats but delivered mixed results for the White House, which avoided a full-scale investigation of the spying operation, according to Senate Republicans, by agreeing to provide detailed briefings on the program to a larger number of lawmakers.
Emerging from a closed-door session in which Democrats lost two party-line votes, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the vice chairman of the committee, said the outcome pushed the panel "further into irrelevancy" and reflected the influence of the Bush administration.
"The committee is, to put it bluntly, basically under the control of the White House," said Rockefeller, who had campaigned for a committee investigation and argued that all members of the panel ought to have full access to information on the program.
Republicans rejected Rockefeller's view and said that the deal reached Tuesday required the White House to back down from its long-standing refusal to provide information on the domestic surveillance operation to more than a handful of lawmakers.
"We should fight the enemy, not each other," said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the chairman of the committee.
Roberts said Republicans also were working with the White House on legislation that would give the government clearer authority to monitor Americans' international phone calls and e-mails, but would place some new controls on such eavesdropping.
The deal announced Tuesday would create a subcommittee with seven members -- four Republicans and three Democrats -- that would get regular briefings on the domestic surveillance activities of the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on calls and e-mail traffic around the world.
Roberts and other Republicans said the White House had agreed to provide members of the new subcommittee extensive access, equivalent to that previously restricted to the chairman and vice chairman.
Since the spying program's inception in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House had allowed only eight members of Congress -- the majority leaders in each house and the ranking members of the two intelligence committees -- to attend intermittent briefings on the program at the White House.
