Democrats to Allow Panel to Vote on Bolton

Senate Democrats, who have stalled the nomination of John R. Bolton to be U.N. ambassador for three weeks, said Tuesday they would not seek new delays when the panel met this week, bringing Bolton a crucial step closer to a vote of the full Senate.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said that although Democrats believed the Bush administration did not fully cooperate with the panel’s investigation of Bolton, they planned to participate in a debate and vote scheduled by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday.

“We’re not going to seek any delay,” Biden, the senior Democrat on the committee, said in an interview after meeting with committee Democrats.

“That’s good news,” said Andy Fisher, spokesman for Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), when told of Biden’s comment. Fisher said Lugar believed that the committee would approve Bolton’s nomination on a party-line vote, with 10 Republicans voting for him and eight Democrats voting against.

But when questioned by reporters, two Republicans on the committee who have voiced reservations about Bolton declined to say they would vote for him. Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) said he was “inclined” to vote for Bolton. Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) refused to say how he was leaning.

“I don’t feel pressure from anyone,” Voinovich said.

Popular with conservatives, Bolton is undersecretary of State and the administration’s top arms control diplomat.

Democrats consider Voinovich the committee Republican most likely to oppose Bolton, although they concede it would be unlikely for any Republican to vote against President Bush’s nominee. If one Republican votes against Bolton on a motion to recommend his nomination to the full Senate, the result would be a tie, and the vote would fail.

Republicans could still send the nomination to the floor if a majority votes to do so with a negative recommendation or with no recommendation. But anything short of a majority vote recommending confirmation would be seen as a setback for Bush and for the Republicans who control the Senate.

Biden and other committee Democrats said they believed that the panel’s interviews had illustrated that Bolton was wrong for the job.

Biden said there was “some pretty powerful testimony” -- much of it from intelligence analysts and current and former State Department officials who described themselves as Republicans -- “that Bolton tried to get rid of analysts with whom he didn’t agree on more than one occasion.”

There was also strong evidence, Biden said, that Bolton “tried to stretch the envelope” on intelligence assessments of unconventional weapons capabilities in Cuba, Iran and North Korea.

But Fisher said the bottom line was that no analyst who clashed with Bolton over assessments lost his job as a result of those disputes and that the department cleared speeches given by Bolton.

“There were confrontations, blow-ups, phrases like: ‘You’re off the case’ used by Bolton or his deputy, but it ended up that nothing really occurred. Intelligence wasn’t changed at the end of the day,” said Fisher, citing interviews by the committee’s staff.

Although the administration has supplied hundreds of documents and e-mails to the panel, Biden said Democrats still were frustrated that the State Department, as of Tuesday afternoon, had not responded to their request for more documents related to Bolton’s position on Syria.

Meanwhile, leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee met Tuesday with Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, about requests by Bolton to see the names of U.S. officials whose overseas conversations were monitored by the National Security Agency.

Bolton made 10 such requests, and the Foreign Relations Committee asked counterparts on the intelligence panel to inquire about the requests. Committee sources refused to say what occurred at the meeting.