President Bush rebuked the Justice Department yesterday for posting on its Web site memos revealing how intricately involved September 11 commissioner and former Clinton administration official Jamie S. Gorelick was in crafting the U.S. counterterror policies she is now judging.
“We were not involved in that,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said when asked about the release of 30 pages of newly declassified documents showing that Ms. Gorelick resisted efforts to lower the so-called “wall” between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.
“I think the president was disappointed about that,” Mr. McClellan said. “I think it’s been communicated to the Justice Department.”
A spokesman for the Department of Justice declined to comment, although Republican lawmakers defended Justice, saying the Senate had requested the memos.
Republicans have accused Ms. Gorelick of being too tainted by her past service as the No. 2 person under Attorney General Janet Reno in the Clinton Justice Department to serve on the September 11 commission.
Some Republicans have called for Ms. Gorelick to step down, but she has refused and has the support of commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey.
Other Republicans simply have asked that Ms. Gorelick — who has testified in private — testify publicly before the commission.
Justice Department officials posted the internal memos from 1995 in response to a request from two Republican senators who had asked for any documentation linking Ms. Gorelick buttressing the wall.
When Attorney General John Ashcroft testified publicly earlier this month, he blamed the wall — and Ms. Gorelick indirectly — for hampering counterterrorism efforts before the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican and one of the senators who asked for the additional documentation, defended the Justice Department after Mr. McClellan’s remarks.
“The Department of Justice did not provide the documents on their own,” he said. “They did so only after they were requested by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
“My request to Justice was in response to the 9/11 commission’s failure to hear testimony from a key Clinton administration Justice Department official,” Mr. Cornyn added. “The commission’s failure to have Commissioner Gorelick provide public testimony is preventing the families of the victims, the American people and the Congress from having a full and complete picture of what led to the failures of 9/11.”
The memos posted on the Justice Department’s Web site pertained to new, heightened guidelines restricting law-enforcement and intelligence agencies from working together to thwart terrorism.
In one memo, former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White balked at the restrictions six years before the attack on the World Trade Center in her southern New York federal district.
“To get a complete picture of how the ’wall’ between domestic law-enforcement and foreign intelligence services contributed to our inability to discover the 9/11 plot, it is essential Commissioner Gorelick testify,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican and the other member of the Judiciary Committee who asked for the Justice Department documents.
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