MB Civic

By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, July 17 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that President Bush had personally decided to block the Justice Department ethics unit from examining the role played by government lawyers in approving the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program.

Mr. Gonzales made the assertion in response to questioning from Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the committee. Mr. Specter said the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department had to call off an investigation into the conduct of department lawyers who evaluated the surveillance program because the unit was denied clearance to review classified documents.

“Why wasn’t O.P.R. given clearance as so many other lawyers in the Department of Justice were given clearance?” Mr. Specter asked.

Mr. Gonzales replied, “The president of the United States makes decisions about who is ultimately given access,” and he added that the president “makes the decision because this is such an important program.”

The head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, H. Marshall Jarrett, began the investigation in response to requests from members of Congress in January. But in May, Mr. Jarrett wrote to Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, a New York Democrat who joined in the request, saying that he could not proceed because he and his colleagues had been denied security clearances to review the history of the secret surveillance program.

The shutting down of Mr. Jarrett’s efforts had been previously reported, but Mr. Gonzales’s comments Tuesday during a hearing on oversight of the Justice Department were the first acknowledgment of Mr. Bush’s direct role.

Administration officials said Mr. Bush made the decision because he believed there were other avenues of oversight, including investigations by the inspectors general of the Justice Department and the National Security Agency as well as the Intelligence Committees of both houses.

“We had to draw the line somewhere,” said a senior Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of lack of authorization to comment. “There was already lots of oversight on this program, and we had to consider the interest” in protecting the program’s secrecy by limiting the number of people who knew its details.

The official also asserted that while some lawyers might have questioned the legality of the surveillance program, there was never an issue of legal ethics, which is the purview of the Office of Professional Responsibility.

“We were trying to limit the scope of people who had access to all the details of the program,’’ the official said, “and a judgment was made that it was not worth reading these additional people into it.”

Mr. Hinchey disagreed, saying that he had been told by officials from the office of the inspector general in the Justice Department that the ethics unit was the appropriate office to investigate how lawyers behaved in evaluating the program and whether they were manipulated.

Paul Martin, the deputy inspector general, said Tuesday that his office was “conducting preliminary inquiries into the F.B.I.’s role and use of information” from the surveillance program.

Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who had also sought an O.P.R. investigation of the surveillance program, said Tuesday that she was shocked that Mr. Bush had blocked the clearances of lawyers from that office.

“The president’s latest action shows that he is willing to be personally involved in the cover-up of suspected illegal activity,” Ms. Lofgren said.

Mr. Gonzales also told the committee that Congress should consider giving explicit approval to the kind of military commissions that the Supreme Court struck down last month.

He also urged Congress to enact a law that would strip federal courts of the ability to consider hundreds of challenges brought by terror suspects being held at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In its ruling last month, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s argument that the law as currently written applied to the hundreds of pending cases.

Mr. Gonzales also seemed to back slightly away from his suggestions that the Justice Department might consider prosecuting reporters who write about classified programs.

Mr. Specter asked him about comments in a May 21 television interview in which the attorney general said he had been trying to determine whether to prosecute someone from The New York Times for its disclosures about the eavesdropping program.

“Are you considering the prosecution of the author of that article?” Mr. Specter asked.

Mr. Gonzales replied that with respect to The Times and other publications, “our longstanding practice, and it remains so today, is that we pursue the leaker.”

He added that the administration “hopes to work with responsible journalists and persuade them not to publish” such articles.