Ashcroft's Terrorism Policies Dismay Some Conservatives
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ASHINGTON, July 23 — Many religious conservatives who were most instrumental in pressing President Bush to appoint John Ashcroft as attorney general now say they have become deeply troubled by his actions as the leading public figure in the law enforcement drive against terrorism.
Their dismay comes as several Bush advisers have begun complaining that Mr. Ashcroft, with his lifelong politician's fondness for attention, has projected himself too often and too forcefully. More significantly, they say privately that he seems to be overstating the evidence of terrorist threats.
Most striking, however, is how some conservatives who were Mr. Ashcroft's biggest promoters for his cabinet appointment after he lost his re-election to the Senate in 2000 have lost enthusiasm. They cite his anti-terrorist positions as enhancing the kind of government power that they instinctively oppose.
"His religious base is now quite troubled by what he's done," said Grover Norquist, a conservative strategist and president of Americans for Tax Reform.
Mr. Norquist, who holds regular lunches with a cross-section of conservative leaders and is influential with White House and Congressional Republicans, said, "If there hadn't been this big-government problem, Ashcroft would have been talked about as the Bush successor. Instead, the talk is that `too bad we pushed for him.' "
Ken Connor, the president of the Family Research Council, said that while he still applauded Mr. Ashcroft's stands on abortion and child pornography, he and many other religious leaders were dismayed by the changes instituted at the Justice Department.
"It's important that we conservatives maintain a high degree of vigilance," Mr. Connor said. "We need to ask ourselves the question, How would our groups fare under these new rules?"
Beyond the conservatives' concerns, some White House advisers say Mr. Ashcroft and his two closest aides have behaved as if his personal political standing was a central priority. Mr. Ashcroft's chief of staff, David Ayres, and the deputy chief of staff, David Israelite, are known collectively as "the two Davids." Both have political backgrounds; Mr. Ayres was Mr. Ashcroft's chief of staff in the Senate and worked on his short-lived presidential campaign in 2000. Mr. Israelite was political director of the Republican National Committee.
One close Bush adviser said Mr. Ashcroft had surrounded himself with people "who think they're still running a presidential campaign."
Mr. Ashcroft finds himself in this unlikely situation in part because, as even some of his fellow Republicans say, he is still trying to make the difficult transition from a senator and before that governor, with no one to answer to but the voters. He is now obliged to hew to the role of a loyal courtier with a specific place on the organization chart.
Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said Mr. Bush was "very pleased with the job the attorney general is doing in prosecuting the war on terrorism."
Mr. Bartlett also disputed that Mr. Ayres and Mr. Israelite were too political. Praising their work, he said, "we have increased the level of communication between the two offices to make sure that we are able to communicate a unified message."
Mr. Ashcroft declined to be interviewed for this article as did Mr. Ayres and Mr. Israelite.
Since Sept. 11, no administration figure has depicted the threat or argued for the need to accept sweeping changes with as much zeal as John Ashcroft.
In the most recent example, Mr. Ashcroft appeared before a packed Congressional hearing the other day in full dire-warning mode. But when he asserted that Al Qaeda was already within the country and "waiting to strike again," several in the administration shook their heads. White House advisers complained that Mr. Ashcroft was overstating the threat. Law enforcement authorities fear Al Qaeda's presence in the United States, but admit that they have not established it as fact.
While he is a highly visible player in the antiterrorism battle, Mr. Ashcroft has had to adjust to the fact that there are few decisions of importance made in the Justice Department without the explicit approval of the White House and its counsel's office, say officials in the Justice Department and the White House.
Mr. Ashcroft received perhaps his first sharp lesson in what his role was supposed to be when the White House sent its antiterrorist legislation to Congress after the attacks.
As a former senator, he began negotiating with his old colleagues as to what concessions might be made to pass what became the USA Patriot Act, officials said in interviews. But when the White House was informed of his discussions, he was stunned to be told that he was not authorized to make such offers.
Even though the legislation centered on the law enforcement world he headed, Mr. Ashcroft was told that any major decisions would be made by Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, and his deputy, Timothy Flanigan. Mr. Flanigan, the chief negotiator on the legislation, said in an interview that Mr. Ashcroft was a full partner.
Sometimes Mr. Ashcroft's high profile served the interest of the White House in that he acted as a lightning rod, attracting and absorbing the criticism that inevitably came from civil liberties advocates over increased law enforcement authority.
But whenever Mr. Ashcroft seemed too independent in performing that role, White House officials let their views be known, as when he began holding regular news conferences last winter, overshadowing Tom Ridge, the president's choice to be the face of antiterrorism. The news conferences quickly became less frequent.
On the morning of June 20, senior Bush aides were stunned as they looked up at their televisions and saw Mr. Ashcroft announcing from Russia the arrest of a man he described as a dangerous terrorist.
The appearance caught many by surprise because Justice Department officials had decided largely on their own to ensure that the attorney general make the first public remarks about the arrest even though he was in Moscow at the time. Adding to the strangeness of the moment, the Russian television studio to which his aides had hurriedly taken him showed him surrounded by an eerie, Armageddon-like red glow.
White House officials put out an alternate, less alarming message about the arrest of Jose Padilla, the man accused of trying to develop a "dirty bomb."
Mr. Ashcroft was also criticized by some in the administration for declaring early on that the case of John Walker Lindh, the Californian who fought for the Taliban, was a major terrorist case. Some officials in the Justice Department believed that the attorney general made needlessly harsh public comments about Mr. Lindh. The case came to an abrupt end last week, when Mr. Lindh pleaded guilty to two felonies and the department dropped the most severe terrorism-related charges against him, treating him as a far less important figure than depicted by the attorney general.
Mr. Ashcroft has, in fact, far friendlier relations with the White House than his predecessor, Janet Reno, had with Bill Clinton and maintains a secure place in the administration. His friends say Mr. Ashcroft is devoted to the president, if for no other reason than that he recognizes that Mr. Bush rescued him from political oblivion.
Still, the two men are hardly confidants, possibly because they have such different personalities, a longtime friend of Mr. Bush said.
Mr. Ashcroft is highly formal and does not fit easily into the president's more bantering style. In addition, Mr. Bush is very much from the business wing of the Republican Party while Mr. Ashcroft is more typical of social-issue Republicans who sit in the front pew of the church on Sunday.
Nonetheless, there has been a mutual respect and trust, the friend said. Since Sept. 11, Mr. Ashcroft confers with the president most mornings at the White House at about 8:30, accompanied by Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I. The meeting typically follows a private session the president has with George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence who sometimes remains.
Mr. Ashcroft's current, high-profile role is a remarkable development in the trajectory of a public career in which he was Missouri's attorney general and governor before being elected to the Senate. Less than a year before the attacks, he lost his re-election bid to Gov. Mel Carnahan, who had been killed in a plane crash a month earlier but remained on the ballot.
Losing to a dead candidate is a decidedly unpromising sign about the electoral future and, to many, John Ashcroft's political career seemed over.
But immediately after Election Day, the leaders of the religious right began campaigning to have him appointed attorney general as their reward for supporting Mr. Bush.
In explaining the religious right's newfound unease about Mr. Ashcroft, Paul Weyrich, the president of the Free Congress Foundation, said, "A lot of the social conservatives appreciate the stands he's taken on child pornography and the Second Amendment and a number of social issues. But there is suddenly a great concern that what was passed in the wake of 9-11 were things that had little to do with catching terrorists but a lot to do with increasing the strength of government to infiltrate and spy on conservative organizations."
Mr. Weyrich, a strong supporter of Mr. Ashcroft's presidential bid in 2000, said that during the weekly luncheon of about 60 social conservative groups he holds, the majority expressed concern about Mr. Ashcroft.
"Because of what he's done," Mr. Weyrich said, "the grassroots enthusiasm for him has been tamped down."
Senator Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania and a former Judiciary Committee colleague, put it this way: "There are several positions that Attorney General Ashcroft has taken that Senator Ashcroft would vehemently oppose."