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Critics deride his appearances before Congress as "carefully orchestrated," but he manages to come away from every face-off stronger than before.
Jun 11, 2003 | Last Wednesday, Attorney General John Ashcroft had a challenge before him. He would appear the next day before a relatively hostile House committee, and he wanted to avoid any "Ashcroft Faces Intense Grilling" headlines in the papers.
The last time Ashcroft appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, Sept. 24, 2001, seems like a different era. The committee comprises members of Congress who had voted against the USA PATRIOT Act -- which gave law-enforcement agencies broad powers almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks in an attempt to prevent similar catastrophes -- as well as those who proudly voted for it, together with a few members whom he saw as revisionists: those who voted for the bill but who have since become critical of both it and Ashcroft. To add insult to injury, only two days before last week's testimony, the Department of Justice's inspector general issued a harshly critical review of the Justice Department's post-9/11 detentions of illegal immigrants.
So the day before, Ashcroft began to prepare. He held a private meeting with 10 U.S. attorneys from around the country to gather anecdotal information he could use. He skipped the annual White House radio-television correspondents dinner, where he was to be the guest of Fox News. And he honed a very aggressive opening statement -- including the proposal of three new anti-terrorism laws -- that in many ways made the House committee his own turf. He wasn't going to "just sit there and be a punching bag," according to a Justice Department source.
To a large extent, the plan worked. "Ashcroft today asked Congress for much tougher powers to fight the war against terror," CNN's Lou Dobbs reported that evening. "Ashcroft said that the PATRIOT Act has weaknesses, weaknesses that terrorists could exploit." The New York Times proclaimed: "Ashcroft Seeks More Power to Pursue Terror Suspects." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran the headline "Federal Death Penalty Use Grows; Bombings Likely to Be Capital Cases."
These were assuredly not the headlines that Ashcroft's critics on the House Judiciary Committee had been dreaming of the night before. Before the hearing, after all, Democratic staffers were handing out fliers alleging that the PATRIOT Act had been misused in a number of ways. Clearly, Democrats had hoped to draw a little blood.
The three key proposals highlighted by those headlines were only a part of what happened at the hearing, of course. Ashcroft was pointedly questioned about his post-9/11 policy and actions not only by Democrats but also by the Republican chairman of the committee, James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin. But, by and large, Ashcroft managed to go to the committee, get his message out, and quite possibly emerge stronger than before.
"Oftentimes there are some members of Congress who think that they're going to bloody him up, but at the end of the hearing they are consistently disappointed at their inability to land any blows," says a source close to Ashcroft. The source says that isn't necessarily because of Ashcroft's political skills, however, "but because of how out of touch these members of Congress are with the American people. A lot of time, the more they attack him on some of these issues, the stronger his support becomes."
The hearing was, one Democratic Senate staffer groused this week, "archetypical Ashcroft." The staffer, who asked not to be identified, surmised from his Ashcroft-watching experience that the attorney general "knew he was in for some close questioning by some of the representatives and that a new death penalty for terrorists would likely be in any headline about the hearing." His presentation was therefore "clearly orchestrated to capture the headline and swamp the pent-up frustration by committee members over the Justice Department's lack of cooperation."
That isn't a strictly partisan perception. There are Hill Republicans who -- albeit somewhat more admiringly -- also viewed Ashcroft's testimony as a clever way to outmaneuver their committee. Some note that they have issues not only with the three proposed laws -- a new death penalty isn't likely to deter the suicidal terrorists of al-Qaida -- but also with the fact that Ashcroft didn't present them with copies of the proposed laws, making it difficult to prepare or to comment on the laws before Ashcroft spoke.
It was just the latest move by a man whose considerable political acumen many have -- sometimes begrudgingly -- come to appreciate.
The source close to Ashcroft claims that "overall the media coverage of the PATRIOT Act is done in a negative light." Ashcroft believes, the source said, that in his rare appearances before the House and Senate Judiciary committees, it is crucial to keep his opponents from getting the upper hand and instead to "remind the American people that terrorism has not ended and to make the case for what he's doing on the war on terrorism." In a December 2001 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ashcroft similarly stole his questioners' thunder by bringing with him an al-Qaida training manual that he deftly wielded before the cameras.
While a repeat performance with the training manual seemed unlikely, Ashcroft knew that some members of the House committee smelled blood. Tensions predated the inspector general's report: Ashcroft had been scheduled to testify before the committee last summer, but when he refused to offer his written testimony ahead of time, as is customary, Sensenbrenner angrily canceled the hearing. In a June 2002 interview with CNN, Sensenbrenner said that in its attempt to prevent terrorism, law enforcement didn't need "to throw respect for civil liberties into the trash heap." On April 1 of this year, Sensenbrenner and the ranking Democrat on the Committee, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, submitted some tough questions to Ashcroft. Most recently, after Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, floated the idea that Congress should consider making the USA PATRIOT Act permanent -- the bill is due to expire in 2005 -- Sensenbrenner told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "That will be done over my dead body."
