US: Democrats made a last demand that the White House turn over documents to shed light on whether John Bolton tried to tamper with intelligence assessments as the US Senate began a debate yesterday on his nomination for UN ambassador.
"It is institutionally inappropriate for us to move forward on this nomination . . . without access" to the information, said Joseph Biden of Delaware, top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Mr Biden complained that the Bush administration "has been stonewalling from the beginning" on classified documents Democrats requested on Mr Bolton, currently the top US diplomat for arms control.
Democrats, joined by Ohio Republican Senator George Voinovich, contend that Mr Bolton is a hardline conservative ideologue and a bully who tried to pressurise intelligence officials into making their findings support his political views.
Mr Biden and Senator Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, said they did not intend to block the nomination with the procedural hurdle known as a filibuster, but wanted to take a stand on the Senate's right to information on a nominee.
President George Bush has conducted a high-profile defence of his embattled nominee, whom he calls the right choice to press for reforms at the United Nations.
"We're confident that John Bolton will be confirmed and there are many in the Senate who believe that he is the right person for this position," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
Mr Biden said the administration documents would provide insights into whether Mr Bolton tried to influence intelligence assessments of Syria and whether he reviewed communications intercepted by the National Security Agency to exact retribution on his opponents.
Mr Biden and Mr Dodd said Senate majority leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, agreed to make a request to the Republican administration for the material.
If the administration refuses to turn over the documents, Mr Biden and Mr Dodd said they would press for a procedural vote today to gauge the Senate's position on the issue.
If they fail to get the 41 votes out of 100 required to extend the debate on the nomination, they said they would agree to go quickly to a vote.
Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts and the committee's top Democrat, Jay Rockefeller, were allowed to review the NSA intercepts. But the administration redacted the names of the Americans involved in the communications, which Democrats said made them almost useless in determining Mr Bolton's motives for seeking them.
Mr Roberts, a Kansas Republican, and Mr Rockefeller of West Virginia, wrote separate letters on their assessments of the material and both said they saw nothing improper about Mr Bolton's requests for the intercepts.
But Mr Rockefeller said Mr Bolton may have violated NSA security procedures by sharing the name of a US person, on at least one other occasion, with another State Department individual.
Mr Roberts, however, chided the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research for not providing information on security procedures for handling the transcripts.
Mr Roberts noted the official who ran the bureau at the time was Carl Ford, who testified in April to the Foreign Relations Committee that Mr Bolton was a "kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy" who tried to force an analyst to bend intelligence on Cuba's weapons to fit a speech he was giving.