House Oversight Subpoenas Rice

By a vote of 21-10, the House Government Reform Committee voted today to issue subpoenas as part of its ongoing investigation into the Bush administration’s use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war and political activities paid for by federal dollars.

The committee voted along party lines to subpoena Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to come before the committee to answer questions about administration claims that Iraq had sought nuclear materials from Niger, “among other matters,” said chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

The committee also voted along party lines to subpoena Republican National Committee documents and e-mails in connection with the scandal in which Karl Rove’s deputy, J. Scott Jennings, held a briefing with the General Services Administration on ways to defeat vulnerable Democrats in 2008. The subpoena seeks to broaden the scope of the investigation to any other federal agency which may have taken part in similar briefings. It also calls RNC chairman Mike Duncan to testify.

Committee Republicans sought to broaden the subpoenas to include comparable Democratic National Committee documents as well as former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in connection with stolen classified documents. Waxman ruled the amendments out of order for lacking relevance to the scope of the RNC subpoena.

Republicans charged that the true purpose of the subpoenas was to drive the RNC into debt by forcing it to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on compliance. Waxman countered that he would work with the RNC to reduce the burden but frequently reminded the minority of the 600,000-plus pages of documents the DNC was forced to produce by the committee's more than one thousand subpoenas during the Clinton administration.

See Also: GOP breaks truce over Rice threat