Gonzales may face perjury inquiry

WASHINGTON – The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee threatened Wednesday to request a perjury investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as Democrats said an intelligence official’s statement about a classified surveillance program was at odds with Gonzales’ sworn testimony.

The latest dispute involving public remarks by Gonzales concerned the topic of a March 10, 2004, White House briefing for members of Congress. Gonzales, in congressional testimony Tuesday, said the purpose of the briefing was to address what he called “intelligence activities” that were the subject of a legal dispute inside the administration.

Gonzales testified that the meeting was not called to discuss a dispute over the National Security Agency’s controversial warrantless surveillance program, a program that he has repeatedly said attracted no serious controversy inside the administration.

But a letter sent to Congress in May 2006 by then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte described the congressional meeting as a “briefing on the Terrorist Surveillance Program,” the name that President Bush has publicly used to describe the warrantless surveillance program.

Democrats pointed to the Negroponte letter Wednesday in an effort to portray Gonzales’ remarks as misleading. They said Gonzales is trying to conceal the existence of a dispute between White House and Justice Department lawyers that involved the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which many Democrats have criticized as an illegal or unjustified abuse of executive-branch authority.

Several Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., have also said the meeting focused on the NSA program and have strongly disputed other characterizations of the meeting by Gonzales.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he is giving Gonzales until late next week to revise his testimony about the surveillance program or he will ask the Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine to conduct a perjury inquiry.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Wednesday that Gonzales “stands by his testimony. … The disagreement … was not about the particular intelligence activity that has been publicly described by the president,” Roehrkasse said. “It was about other highly classified intelligence activities.”

DNI spokesman Ross Feinstein declined to comment, referring questions to Justice.

The dispute represents the latest political difficulty for Gonzales, who endured a four-hour grilling from Leahy’s committee on Tuesday and has been under fire all year for his handling of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year.