NYT: Stormy Outlook as Gonzales Faces Senate Democrats

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who has faced controversy throughout his two-year tenure, is likely to enter an even stormier phase next Thursday when he appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for the first time since control fell to the Democrats.

But he shows little anxiety about more vehement criticism of his stewardship at the Justice Department.

“They have an institutional interest to gather up information about what the executive branch is doing,” Mr. Gonzales said Friday, in an interview in which he adopted the mildly juridical tone of a law professor.

Referring to the Justice Department, he said: “We likewise have an institutional interest in maintaining the confidentially of certain kinds of information. From my perspective, there are two competing institutional interests. This is not a partisan issue. It’s an institutional issue of interests that have to be accommodated.”

But there seems to be little likelihood that the Judiciary Committee will be satisfied with that kind of summation.

Mr. Gonzales’s chief antagonist is likely to be the panel’s chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat who in recent public statements has castigated the Bush administration for years of “corrosive unilateralism” in refusing to cooperate with Congress and said he would enforce the committee’s demands for information with subpoenas if necessary.

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