Patrick Leahy: “last night, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales responded to the letter that Senator Daschle and I sent to the…”

“last night, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales responded to the letter that Senator Daschle and I sent to the President this week, renewing the request that the Judiciary Committee made for the Justice Department work records of Mr. Estrada. This is a request that the Judiciary Committee first made nearly a year ago, and it is a request that has been made repeatedly since then. I regret that, at this point, the White House remains recalcitrant and continues to stand in the way of a solution to this impasse. For an administration that engages in lawyer-bashing at every turn, there is some irony in the fact that the White House has put a bevy of lawyers to work to compose a lawyer's brief rather than a straightforward response to Senator Daschle's good-faith effort to resolve this standoff. But the letter from Mr. Gonzales does provide some new information that is quite interesting in one respect, at least. Buried within the 15-page letter is a new admission that the Justice Department and Senate Republicans had previously refused to make. The administration has finally acknowledged that there is precedent for providing the very types of documents the Judiciary Committee requested almost a year ago in connection with Mr. Estrada's nomination. Interestingly, the administration in this letter makes no claim of legal privilege or executive privilege to withhold these documents from the Senate.”