Senate Intelligence Panel Frayed by Partisan Infighting

In 1997, the GOP-led panel thwarted president Bill Clinton's nominee to be CIA director, Anthony Lake, using stalling tactics that some felt were overtly political. "Washington has gone haywire" in partisanship, Lake fumed. Clinton decried a "cycle of political destruction."

The Iraq war has accelerated the fracturing, with Democrats and some outside groups saying Republicans seemed more eager to control GOP political damage than to conduct independent oversight. In November 2003, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) abruptly canceled the committee's hearing into prewar intelligence on Iraq because of GOP anger over a leaked memo -- written by a Democratic aide -- that suggested a strategy for extending the probe more deeply into the executive branch.

Insiders say nothing angered Roberts more than last November's parliamentary tactic in which Democrats, without warning, briefly forced the Senate into an unusual closed session. Democrats were protesting the intelligence committee's delay in completing the second phase of its promised inquiry into how intelligence was used before the invasion of Iraq.

In an interview last week, Roberts cited the 2003 leaked memo and the Senate shutdown as evidence that Democrats are at least as culpable as Republicans for the partisan bickering. Democrats, meanwhile, note that the committee still has not completed the inquiry's long-promised second phase.

Far more troubling, they say, are Roberts's efforts to protect Bush from a vigorous investigation into his 2001 decision to allow the National Security Agency to monitor Americans' international phone calls and e-mails, without obtaining warrants. The operation, which some GOP lawmakers say appears illegal, was not known publicly until three months ago.

"This Republican Congress is simply too much of a rubber stamp for this administration," said Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an intelligence committee member. The panel showed no such deference to Clinton, he said, repeatedly summoning administration officials for grillings. "The contrast between that and the last six years of the Bush administration is just such a deep reluctance or refusal to do probing oversight," Levin said.

Roberts appears unfazed. "I'd rather look forward" rather than dwell on past actions, he said in the interview. Even the notion of bringing the NSA program under the purview of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- which numerous Republican lawmakers advocate -- is too much for Roberts.

Committee Democrats "now want to work with the administration to update the law to include this sensitive and extremely important surveillance program," he wrote in the Hill. "This is not oversight. It is political opportunism at its worst."

Research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.