White House Will Hold Back Some Papers Nominee Wrote

Defying Senate Democrats, the Bush administration will withhold some documents written by Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. while he worked for earlier Republican administrations, advisors to the White House said Sunday.

The documents, written while Roberts worked in President Reagan’s White House and President George H.W. Bush’s Justice Department, will be withheld on grounds of lawyer-client privilege, they said on Sunday news shows. Some Democratic senators disputed the need to keep them secret, saying precedent argued for their release.

Roberts, 50, worked in the Reagan White House counsel’s office from 1982 to 1986. He served in the Justice Department of the first President Bush as principal deputy solicitor general.

Fred D. Thompson, a lawyer, actor and Republican ex-senator who is advising the nominee, said Roberts’ writings as deputy solicitor general involved “internal documents, memos about ongoing recommendations and positions.” He compared them to privileged conversations with a priest, a physician or a spouse.

“There are lots of good reasons why [making them public] is a bad idea,” Thompson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, who appeared on three news shows, warned that releasing internal documents written by Justice Department lawyers “does chill communications between line attorneys and their superiors within the Department of Justice.”

On “Fox News Sunday,” he characterized the documents as “very sensitive, very deliberative information, not something that the administration or any White House would be inclined to share because it is so sensitive.”

Thompson, who served three decades ago as chief counsel to Republicans on the Senate Watergate Committee, contended that leaders in both parties, from “[Watergate special prosecutor] Archibald Cox on down,” believed that such documents should be withheld.

He added: “We hope we don’t get into a situation where documents are asked for that folks know will not be forthcoming, and we got all hung up on that.”

But the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, disputed that there was a lawyer-client privilege.

“It’s a total red herring to say, oh, we can’t show this,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

He said Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, former federal appellate judge Robert H. Bork, former Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and others had given up documents written while they worked for the Justice Department.

“Those working in the solicitor general’s office are not working for the president; they’re working for you and me and all the American people,” Leahy said. He said there was “so much precedence” for providing such documents.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) described the documents as a potentially revealing part of Roberts’ record.

“There have been important questions raised about things that he said and things that he wrote when he was working for the government,” Durbin said on NBC.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), on ABC, said he believed the administration might be able to release Roberts’ writings from the solicitor general’s office, but not from his tenure in the White House counsel’s office.

Disclosing documents written in direct service to the president “could have a real chilling effect on the kind of candor in communications that people would have with the president,” McCain said.

Democratic senators stopped short of saying they would vote against Roberts, or try to filibuster his confirmation, if the administration withheld papers they believed to be relevant.

“You have to see it in context,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on “Fox News Sunday.”