The news was that there was no news.
She showed up and testified–but in the end former White House political director Sara Taylor didn’t–or couldn’t–say much.
Again and again at a hearing of the Senator Judiciary Committee, the underling of Karl Rove invoked the order of executive privilege President Bush mandated on Monday to prevent his aides from testifying about the dismissal of nine US Attorneys. But in between her frequent bouts of non-answer, Taylor did manage to include a plug for her boss.
Taylor told Chairman Patrick Leahy that she never discussed firing the attorneys with the President. “I don’t believe the White House did anything wrong,” she stated.
If there was no foul play, Senators wondered, then why couldn’t she discuss what went on at her old employ?
Leahy blasted the President’s executive privilege intervention as “an unprecedented blanket assertion” and kept asking “What is it that the White House is trying to hide?”
President Bush announced this afternoon that Harriet Miers will not testify on Thursday before Congress as scheduled. Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Committee and the only GOP Senator to originally show up, even suggested that Taylor and Miers could face criminal contempt charges for following Bush’s order “not to testify concerning White House communications whether internal or external.”
The 32-year-old Taylor, who worked with Rove on a daily basis for four years, did an expert job of cherrypicking. She spent three hours of testimony answering almost any question that did not implicate the White House in “Attorneygate” and invoked executive privilege when Senators pressed for specifics about the hiring and firing of federal prosecutors. She admitted toward the end of her hearing that while she tried to be consistent in honoring the President’s executive privilege, “perhaps I have not done a great job.”
In fairness, Taylor was placed in an untenable spot by the President. Answer questions and violate a however misguided presidential order. Or refuse to talk and anger Senators hungry to get to the bottom of this convoluted story. Senators understood that she was yet another pawn in the Bush Administration’s resistance to Congressional inquiry. “The White House has put you in a position of being a tight-rope walker,” said New York Democrat Chuck Schumer. Illinois’s Dick Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, added, “Karl Rove should be sitting at that table, not you.”
Reporting by Matthew Blake
