White House requests spying-document delay

CRAWFORD, Texas – The White House on Friday asked a Senate panel for more time to produce subpoenaed information about the legal justification for President Bush’s secretive eavesdropping program.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy had set Monday as the deadline for administration officials already subpoenaed to provide documents and testimony about the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program.

The White House already has been given one extension, said an aide to Leahy, D-Vt.

“In requesting that last extension, the White House counsel suggested that the administration would be ready to respond by Aug. 1,” Leahy spokeswoman Erica Chabot said Friday. “The new deadline is three weeks past the time the White House counsel had estimated was needed. The committee looks forward to the administration complying with the subpoenas.”

In a letter to Leahy, White House counsel Fred Fielding contended that the subpoenas sought production of “extraordinarily sensitive national security information” and that much of the information – if not all – could be subject to a claim of executive privilege.

Fielding asked Leahy to suspend the deadline until after Labor Day.

On June 27, the committee subpoenaed the Justice Department, National Security Council and the offices of the president and vice president for documents regarding the National Security Agency’s legal justification for the wiretapping program. Since then, the issue has been the subject of several letters exchanged between Capitol Hill and the White House.

In one to Fielding, on Aug. 8, Leahy noted that he had granted the White House’s request to postpone the subpoenas’ original July 18 deadline but was setting a new deadline of Aug. 20 because he could not wait any longer.

In Fielding’s letter to Leahy – released by the White House in Crawford, where Bush is staying at his ranch – the president’s lawyer said the White House had identified a core group of documents in response to the subpoenas, but the work is “by no means complete” and could not be finished by Monday.

Fielding suggested further conversations with the panel, saying the White House did not want the issue to interfere with the administration’s desire to make permanent the new powers Congress just gave NSA to monitor communications entering the United States involving foreigners who are the subjects of a national security investigation.

Lawmakers said the new provisions would expire after six months, unless renewed by Congress.