Days of Fire by Peter Baker

Author:Peter Baker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House LLC
Published: 2013-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

BUSH HAD HAD IT with the conservatives who were beating up Harriet Miers. The more they attacked her, the more he dug in. “I do not care about them at all,” he railed to an aide one day. “I don’t care what they say. This is my choice. I know who she is. I know what kind of justice she will be. I trust her.”

But the situation for Miers was growing worse, not because of the loud activists, but because of the soft-spoken nominee herself. Like John Roberts, Miers would prepare by going through “murder boards,” practice sessions where colleagues playing senators would throw questions at her. To get ready, she invited several lawyers to her second-floor office in the West Wing, including William Burck from the White House and Rachel Brand from the Justice Department. They sat down in the paneled office and tried some practice questions, although they were continually interrupted by BlackBerry messages and phone calls as Miers also tended to her White House duties.

Burck quizzed her on criminal law, laying out hypothetical situations. “So, in this particular circumstance,” he said at one point, “when you search a car, do you think the law is correct that all you need is reasonable suspicion versus probable cause?”

Miers looked hesitant and confused. “I don’t know what either of those two mean,” she admitted.

The lawyers were shocked. A corporate lawyer overseeing contracts and financial dealings might not need to know the definition of probable cause, but when it came to the highest court in the land, that was as basic as it got. If she could not handle the most fundamental terminology, how would she survive under the klieg lights of a Senate hearing? They went through more questions and discovered how little she knew. The Fourth Amendment on search and seizure, the Fifth Amendment on self-incrimination, “she literally knew nothing about it at all, nothing,” one official recalled.

The formal murder boards were even worse. The prep sessions were so embarrassing that administration officials kept out conservative lawyers who often participated, including Boyden Gray and Leonard Leo of the Four Horsemen. “They wouldn’t let us,” Gray recalled, “and both of us looked at each other and said that means she isn’t going to make it if they can’t allow us to see what’s going on.”

It was not much better on Capitol Hill. When Miers got uncomfortable, she tended to shut down and as she paid courtesy calls on senators, she returned to the White House each day with less support than when she had left, even among the Republicans. “Harriet, you’re going to have to say something next time,” Senator Jeff Sessions, a conservative from Alabama, told her after one meeting. When Miers asked Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma how she did during their session, he responded, “Harriet, you flunked.” More critically, Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was offended when she contradicted his account of what she had said about privacy rights during their meeting. He was

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