While everyone's heads are turned watching the attorney purge issue ... Starting Friday, the House Oversight Committee will gavel in the proceedings over the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson...

The following was picked up from the sidebar at TPMuckraker :

From Politco.com | March 12, 2007 07:32 PM EST

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, might ask White House officials to testify about their actions involving the CIA leak case, Democratic sources tell Politico.

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Congressional sources say Republicans have made a tentative request to call Victoria Toensing, an outspoken lawyer who was instrumental in writing the law protecting the identities of intelligence agents. She contends that no crime was committed in the outing of Plame.

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A senior administration official said the White House is preparing for numerous investigations by Democrats, who now control both the House and the Senate. “They’re going to be getting up in our cupboards on all sorts of matters,” the official said. Fred Fielding, who took over as White House counsel this year after the departure of Harriet Miers, is hiring more staff as he prepares for congressional negotiations.

Administration officials say Fielding, a lawyer in the Nixon White House and chief counsel to President Ronald Reagan, plans to cooperate, avoiding confrontation where he can.

Friday’s hearing with Plame will be carried live on the committee’s Website, www.oversight.house.gov. And depending on what the Central Intelligence Agency clears her to say, Plame may rebut assertions by some conservatives that she had a lower level of covert status.

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Toensing, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration and frequent legal analyst on television, helped write the law protecting intelligence agents when she was chief counsel for Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, from 1981 to 1984.

If Republicans formalize their request for her testimony, Waxman will decide whether it would be relevant, the Democratic sources said. In a piece in The Washington Post’s Outlook section on Feb. 18, Toensing wrote that Fitzgerald had ignored “the fact that there was no basis for a criminal investigation from the day he was appointed” and that the CIA only objected to the leak of Plame’s identity “to cover its derriere.”

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Waxman is determined to be an activist on many fronts. He’s just asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for more information about the president’s claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. And he’s even considering a hearing about the surprise announcement Sunday by Halliburton that its chief executive would move from Houston to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

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The original Politico article with readers comments (more like a whine fest) appears here . . .

~OGD~

aka/ O anonymous one...