As we mentioned earlier today, House Oversight's subpoenas for Bush and Cheney's interview records from DOJ Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's inquiry into the Valerie Plame leak case were rebuffed by the Justice Department.

Since then, we've obtained a copy of the letter dated June 24 that the Justice Department sent to Congress, declining to comply with the subpoena.

Their reasons? The ever-ready assertion of executive privilege because the write ups of the FBI interviews with White House officials during the Plame leak investigation contain accounts of of internal White House deliberations, including those involving how to respond to the fallout from the infamous 16 words on Niger yellowcake in the President's 2003 State of the Union address:

However, these reports also contain considerable information detailing the internal White House deliberations and communications of senior White House staff concerning how they should respond on behalf of the President to public assertions challenging the accuracy of a statement made in the President's State of the Union Address.

The DOJ was also concerned that by releasing their interview records with Bush and Cheney, they would create a disincentive for future voluntary interviews from the executive branch. . . despite the fact that it's all been done before. In 1999, the FBI surrendered interview records of former President Bill Clinton and former Vice-President Al Gore:

We are aware that in 1999 the Department made available to this Committee the FBI reports of interviews with President Clinton and Vice President Gore that were taken during the Department's campaign finance investigation. We consider that situation to be fundamentally different from the present situation. We understand that the intrusion on Executive Branch confidentiality interests was significantly less because the Clinton Administration interview reports presumably did not involve the substance of internal White House deliberations and communications concerning official White House business, but rather concerned campaign-fundraising political activities.

The full text of the letter, after the jump.

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Two weeks ago, Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee issued subpoenas for FBI paperwork regarding interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

And now the Justice Department has responded: Think again, Henry.

In the latest subpoena denial from the administration, Attorney General Mukasey informed the Committee that it will not be issuing documents to comply with the congressionally issued subpoena.

But Waxman is giving them one last chance. In a letter to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald on Friday, he informed Fitzgerald that the DOJ has until July 3rd to release the requested documents.

It looks like the House Judiciary Committee will finally play hardball with Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) has been requesting a range of documents from DOJ for a long time. Some of the issues date back as far as Election Day 2002, when Republicans in New Hampshire jammed the phone lines for a Democratic get-out-the-vote call bank, an effort one GOP operative said was modeled on the U.S. Marines tactic of jamming the enemies communications.

Now Conyers has the authority to subpoena that stack of records after the subcommittee on commercial and administrative law took a vote today and gave him the formal go-ahead.

They're looking for records of interviews from the DOJ investigation into who leaked the identify of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, documents that may shed light on allegations of selective prosecution, and the details behind the replacement of Minnesota's U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose. The committee is also requesting Office of Legal Counsel memos and enforcement reports from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

Speaking of the Civil Rights Division, Conyers and several other lawmakers today sent a letter to Mukasey urging stop stonewalling a GAO investigation of the Civil Rights Division. Amid allegations that political pressures were shifting the division's priorities, Congress in March 2007 requested the Government Accountability Office conduct an investigation. Lawmakers say DOJ has not provided the documents and data needed to fully analyze the division's enforcement work.

The lawmakers also said they had "received reports that DOJ officials have removed key documents from files, claiming that GAO does not have a right to access predecisional or deliberative information that sets forth the Division's rationale on whether or not to pursue a case."

"We are troubled by the lack of transparency and refusal of the Department to cooperate fully with GAO's investigation," the lawmakers wrote in today's letter.

Following the Inspector General's report on bias in the Justice Department hiring process, and John Conyers (D-MI)'s call to action, Attorney General Michael Mukasey has issued a statement accepting all of the recommendations from the OIG:

I appreciate the hard work and collaboration of the Department's Office of Professional Responsibility and Office of Inspector General on this report. The Department overhauled its Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program hiring processes last year, and I am pleased that the report remarked positively on these institutional changes.

I have also made clear, and will continue to make clear, that the consideration of political affiliations in the hiring of career Department employees is impermissible and unacceptable. The joint report issued today contains additional recommendations aimed at ensuring that political and ideological affiliations are not inappropriately used to evaluate candidates for these programs; I accept, and have directed the implementation, of all of those recommendations.

Following this morning's release of the DOJ inspector general's report on political bias in hiring and firing practices, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), called on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to implement the IG's recommendations:

Yet again, the Department has been putting politics where it doesn't belong. The report concludes that under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' tenure in 2006, several Department officials including Michael Elston violated federal law and Justice Department policy. We already know from the Committee testimony of Monica Goodling that she 'crossed a line' in hiring career attorneys as well.

When it comes to the hiring of nonpartisan career attorneys, our system of justice should not be corrupted by partisan politics. It appears the politicization at Justice was so pervasive that even interns had to pass a partisan litmus test.

The committee's recommendations included making sure guidelines "explicitly state that political affiliations may not be used as criteria in evaluating candidates and that ideological affiliations cannot be used as a proxy to discriminate on the basis of political affiliation;" changing the DOJ Human Resource Order to emphasize that hiring attorneys must be "merit based," and having Department leaders be "vigilant to ensure that political or ideological affiliations are not used to select candidates."

[Late Update]: Attorney General Michael Mukasey has issued a statement saying that the Justice Department will immediately implement the suggestions of the Inspector General's report.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said today that the "troubling" report "confirms our findings and our fears that the same senior Department officials involved with the firing of United States Attorneys were injecting improper political motives into the process of hiring young attorneys."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) echoed those sentiments, stating that the report "confirms that the Bush Administration was engaged in a deliberate effort to inject partisan politics into the administration of justice."