President invokes executive privilege to deny access to documents

President Bush invoked executive privilege for the first time today, acting to keep Congress from seeing documents of prosecutors' decisionmaking in cases ranging from decades-old Boston murders to the Clinton fundraising investigation, the Associated Press reported.

The President wrote that the "disclosure to Congress of confidential advice to the attorney general" on whether to bring criminal charges would "inhibit the candor necessary to the effectiveness of the deliberative process by which the department makes prosecutorial decisions."

The decision immediately affects a subpoena from the House Government Reform Committee for documents related to informants in 1960s murders in Boston. More importantly, it sets a new policy in which the administration will resist lawmakers' requests to view prosecutorial decisionmaking documents that have been routinely turned over to Congress in the past.

Aware that the White House was considering such a new policy, Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind., said recently, "If this unprecedented policy is permitted to stand, Congress will not be able to exercise meaningful oversight of the executive branch."