Let's Make a Deal

President Obama's White House lawyers played a critical behind-the-scenes role in brokering an agreement that requires George W. Bush's former aides Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to testify before Congress about the mass firings of U.S. attorneys, according to congressional and White House sources.

Obama's aides were anxious to put a stop to an ongoing court battle over executive privilege that could have backfired on them, said the sources, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters.

The active involvement of Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig and his associates in pushing for a settlement shows how stark positions taken during the campaign often look different when a new president has taken office. As a candidate last year, Obama sharply criticized the Bush administration for making sweeping claims of executive privilege to shield testimony about the U.S. attorney firings. "This blanket notion that you can't subpoena White House aides where there's evidence of genuine wrongdoing I think is completely misguided," he said last year.

But if the dispute over executive privilege hadn't been settled by Wednesday night, Obama's lawyers would have been put in the uncomfortable position of having to defend Rove and Miers in court. The alternative would have been to accept the possibility of a judicial ruling that might have impinged on the confidentiality of their own discussions about sensitive issues should those discussions later become the subject of congressional investigations.

Craig even faced the politically embarrassing prospect of being named (along with Miers and possibly Rove) as a defendant in the court case, given that five boxes of documents about the U.S. attorney firings have been sitting in his office for the past six weeks. Craig became the official custodian of the documents, which have never been made public, after Jan. 20.

As a result, Craig at times took a hard line in trying to get both sides to make concessions, the sources said. At one point this week, he even told House Democratic lawyers he would authorize Obama's Justice Department to oppose them in court if they didn't back down from some of their demands to complete access to the material.