Captain's Quarters -

With new memos fueling the fire over the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors and a botched job of explaining them to Congress, the Bush administration needs some professional assistance in cleaning up the mess. Recognizing this, the White House has reached out to one of the GOP's best political consultants to start negotiating behind the scenes with Congress to smooth the tension over Alberto Gonzales' poor handling of the issue:

It was hardly a social call when Fred F. Fielding, the new White House counsel, turned up Wednesday afternoon on Capitol Hill.

He had come to negotiate with Democrats, who are investigating whether politics played a role in the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors and demanding testimony from Karl Rove and other top aides to President Bush. But Mr. Fielding’s real task is even bigger and more delicate: to serve as the point man for the White House as it decides the future of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, a longtime Texas friend and confidant of Mr. Bush.

In bringing Mr. Fielding back to the West Wing this year, Mr. Bush turned to the kind of consummate Washington insider he disdained when he first came to town, a Republican who remained prominent in the capital as presidents of both parties have come and gone.

Now, occupying a job he held under Ronald Reagan more than 20 years ago, Mr. Fielding, 67, is the White House front man in a high-stakes showdown with the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill even as he scrambles behind the scenes to determine what his new colleagues knew and when.

Soft-spoken and slightly rumpled, he was polite but did not reveal much on Wednesday, lawmakers said. He stayed 20 minutes, just long enough to hear Democrats make their case that Mr. Bush should not assert executive privilege to keep his aides from talking. He left without a hint of what he might do, and said he would report back to them on Friday.

Fielding is a man who understands how to handle a crisis. He has spent enough time in Washington to build his credibility as a man who understands how to stay clean, and how to get clean in a hurry. He issued the order to release the e-mails that have made clear how badly Gonzales botched the communication to Congress, whom he assured that the White House had no involvement in the firings. Fielding understands from his days in the Nixon and Reagan administrations that holding back information makes it much more significant when it finally comes out, and he's using a classic litigator's trick -- disclose before your opponents reveal.

Bush chose Fielding wisely. He replaced Harriet Miers when the former counsel left the administration, and one of his assets as counsel is his ability to broker deals across partisan divides. He worked to do so with the 9/11 Commission, as he did with previous administrations, garnering a reputation as a straight shooter with all sides. John Conyers left his meeting with Fielding satisfied that he could work with him on testimony to Congress about the bungled communications from the AG and his office to Capitol Hill, and that will help dial down the temperature to a rational level.

Last night, I discussed this controversy with Patterico on my CQ Radio show at Blog Talk Radio. Originally, I invited him on the show to debate, because we have had some differences of opinion about the issue. However, we found many points of agreement. Neither of us think laws were broken in the dismissals, and both of us think Gonzales screwed up badly enough in the aftermath that he's probably going to resign soon. We agreed that Kyle Sampson deserved the boot he got for his heavy-handed manner in which these dismissals were carried out, and especially for the notion that the DoJ should go ahead and fire people because they had the power to do so, and they should use it for the sake of using it.

The only points on which we disagreed was whether the firings were justified and whether they were a good idea. Listen to the stream (it's in the second half of the show) to hear the excellent discussion we had on the topic, and hear Patterico's background on these cases. I still believe the dismissals were a mistake, especially given the mid-term status of the eight prosecutors involved, but Patterico convinced me that they all had some level of justification.

UPDATE: Cavalry, not artillery. I need to go back to Cliché School.