Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said today that he’s still pushing to question Bush administration officials about the U.S. attorney firings.
“All the breadcrumbs, as we call them, go right to the White House,” Conyers said in a speech to the National Press Club this afternoon.
“We have to keep the process working,” he said.
Conyers said he’s pushing for a “blue ribbon panel” to investigate the firings, “a 9/11-type panel … so that we can publicly go into what we talked about and have been doing,” he said. No congressmen would sit on the panel, he said. It would operate in the public eye, as opposed to the special prosecutor he’s been asking Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint.
He also said the committee is trying to enforce the subpoenas against former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and former Chief of Staff Josh Bolten.
“You get around to everyone saying I can’t come, (citing) executive privilege, I can’t answer these questions,” Conyers said. “But wait a minute! You don’t know what questions we’re gonna ask. And besides, if we ask one that you think deserves to be challenged, we’ll set it aside and see if we can work something out. But the blanket (argument that) anybody near the White House doesn’t have to come to a hearing, that wouldn’t wash in my son’s freshman class…much less with me.”
On Bolten, Conyers said, “He’s got a lot of documents.”