Top Senate Republican accuses Cheney of seeking to undermine wiretap probe

In a letter to the vice president that he said was "neither pleasant nor easy" to write, US Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Cheney of trying to dissuade members of the panel from agreeing to hold a closed door hearing on the program.

Specter has vowed to hold hearings into revelations about the secret compilation of phone records by the National Security Agency, and has said he would summon the CEOs of three telephone companies -- AT and T, Verizon and BellSouth -- to testify.

But the veteran lawmaker wrote in his letter to the vice president that he learned that Cheney had been working to undermine his efforts to mount the hearings.

"I was advised yesterday that you had called Republican members of the Judiciary Committee lobbying them to oppose any Judiciary Committee hearing -- even a closed one -- with the telephone companies," Specter wrote.

"I was further advised that you told those Republican members of the Judiciary Committee that the telephone companies had been instructed not to provide any information to the committee, as they were prohibited from disclosing classified information.

"I was surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence -- really determine -- the action of the committee without calling me first," wrote Specter, who again threatened to issue subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify.

He added, however, that he hoped to avoid "a constitutional conflict between the Congress and the president."

News reports last month disclosed that the Bush administration had collected billions of US telephone records in its war on terrorism, although the government, which has not admitted the existence of the program, insisted that the privacy of Americans has not been compromised by any of its surveillance activities.

Reports of the program had fueled fears here that the Bush administration was sacrificing civil liberties in its efforts to prevent new acts of anti-American terror following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Specter, in his letter to Cheney, slammed the George W. Bush administration's insistence on using domestic wiretaps without judicial or congressional approval, saying the program "denigrates the constitutional authority and responsibility of Congress."

Since the disclosure of the "data mining" efforts, he has called on the Bush administration to be more forthcoming about the details of the program, which the NSA has conducted without seeking warrants from a special court established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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