WASHINGTON – A defiant President Bush vowed Tuesday to fight any effort by Congress to compel the testimony of top White House advisors about the firing of federal prosecutors, setting up a potential constitutional showdown and the first major direct confrontation with the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill.

The president also defended embattled Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales and accused Democrats more broadly of trying to score “political points” rather than “gather facts” over the dismissal last year of eight United States attorneys. He offered instead to release all White House communications related to the issue and to allow the aides to be interviewed privately but not under oath, a proposal that Democrats rejected.

“There is no indication that anybody did anything improper,” the president said in a brief statement in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. “We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants.”

The president said he would challenge in court any subpoena of his top aides. After days of limited comment, Bush moved to take the offensive on the issue at a time when his popularity is near all-time lows.

Democratic leaders said they would press ahead with plans to subpoena Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove and others.

The White House’s offer to let Rove and others answer congressional questions “doesn’t do the job of figuring out what happened,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Fred Fielding, the president’s general counsel, said the White House is attempting to fully cooperate, explaining in a letter to congressional leaders that “the president must remain faithful to the fundamental interests of the presidency and the requirements of the constitutional separation of powers.”

At the same time, Fielding wrote, more than 3,000 pages of documents delivered to Capitol Hill by the Justice Department this week “do not reflect that any U.S. attorney was replaced to interfere with a pending or future criminal investigation.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., complaining that the Justice Department has provided conflicting stories about the prosecutors’ firings, said: “If Karl Rove plans to tell the truth, he has nothing to fear from being under oath like any other witness.”

The threat of subpoenas isn’t the only political fire the White House is attempting to dampen. With Democratic leaders, and some Republicans, calling for Gonzales’ resignation, Bush had telephoned his attorney general, his longtime friend from Texas, shortly after dawn Tuesday with “a very strong vote of confidence.”

“He’s got support with me. I support the attorney general,” the president said later at the White House.

‘Just flat false’

The White House also rejected as “just flat false, period,” news reports that the administration already is considering replacements for Gonzales.

But Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin has a candidate for Gonzales’ replacement: Chicago-based U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, whom Gonzales’ top aide had privately graded as “not distinguished.”

The rankings of Fitzgerald and the other 92 U.S. attorneys, in part according to their perceived loyalty to Bush, has stoked congressional anger at Gonzales.

Fitzgerald wrote the U.S. government’s indictment of Osama bin Laden and in 2002 he won the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service for prosecuting the terrorist bombers of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Behind scenes

The massive document delivery from the Justice Department to Congress sheds little new light on the controversy. But it provided a window on behind-the-scenes confrontations between some of the prosecutors who would eventually be fired and critics in Congress and the department, as well as a taste of the human cost of the upheaval.

In an Aug. 31, 2006 e-mail, for example, Brent Ward, the head of a Justice Department anti-pornography task force complained to a Justice colleague he had “sat in a meeting with (prosecutor) Paul Charlton in Phoenix and heard him thumb his nose at us” with a reluctance to take on obscenity cases. Ward also complained about another fired prosecutor, Daniel Bogden, of Nevada.

Seven of the eight prosecutors were fired on Dec. 7, while the eighth, Bud Cummins, of Arkansas, resigned in June and was replaced by a protege of Rove.

As awareness of the firings increased in January, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and other officials involved in the dismissals assembled a list of talking point criticisms of each of the dismissed prosecutors for use in congressional testimony.

Bogden, for example, was found to have a “lack of energy and leadership for a highly visible district with serious crime issues,” while Charlton was tagged with “repeated instances of defiance, insubordination, actions taken contrary to instructions, and actions taken that were clearly unauthorized.”

Carol Lam, of the Southern District of California, was criticized for “failure to perform in relation to significant leadership priorities (i.e. immigration and gun crime.)”

The documents also revealed the anguish of at least one prosecutor, Margaret Chiara of the western district of Michigan, who complained that she had been smeared by “the notoriety of being one of the “USA 8″‘ and asked McNulty to pull strings to get her a job training prosecutors.

“Will you please intervene to make this position available to me?” she asked McNulty in a Feb. 9 e-mail.

Eight days earlier, Chiara e-mailed McNulty complaining that “now that it has been widely reported that departing USAs have either failed to meet performance expectations or that they acted independently . . . the situation is so much worse. You know that I am in neither category. This makes me so sad. Why have I been asked to resign?”

Some records were redacted, including one that seemed to indicate that additional prosecutors may have been marked for dismissal.

Under ordinary circumstances, the Justice Department would not need to explain firings of U.S. attorneys because they serve at the pleasure of the president.

Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush replaced nearly all 93 U.S. attorneys at the start of their first terms.

But some of the fired prosecutors complained of being pressured by lawmakers in connection with politically sensitive investigations.

One of the sacked prosecutors, David Iglesias of New Mexico, said he felt “leaned on” following inquiries in 2006 from two Republicans, Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, regarding a corruption investigation involving a prominent Democrat.

Gonzales also has had to retreat from early assurances to Congress that the White House played a minimal role in the dismissals after records released by the Justice Department showed that discussions about replacing prosecutors began shortly after the 2004 election and included a proposal by former White House counsel Harriet Miers to fire all 93 of the prosecutors.

Perhaps most provocatively, Gonzales’ former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, in March 2005 ranked prosecutors using criteria including “loyalty to the President and Attorney General.”

Sampson resigned March 12. A Justice Department spokesman referred questions about the rankings to Sampson. Sampson’s attorney did not return a call seeking comment.

Conspicuous by his silence in the records is Gonzales, who, according to a spokesman, does not use e-mail, making him less likely to leave a paper trail.

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