President Bush arriving on Thursday to address a crowd at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
With Mr. Mukasey’s confirmation in doubt over his refusal to state a clear legal position on a classified Central Intelligence Agency program to interrogate terrorism suspects, Mr. Bush took the unusual step of summoning a small group of reporters into the Oval Office to preview remarks he planned to make later in the day at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization here.
“I believe that the questions he’s been asked are unfair,” Mr. Bush said. “He’s not been read into the program — he has been asked to give opinions of a program or techniques of a program on which he’s not been briefed. I will make the case — and I strongly believe this is true — that Judge Mukasey is not being treated fairly.”
The president’s remarks and a separate address on Thursday by Vice President Dick Cheney demonstrate just how much the White House has been caught off guard by the fight over Mr. Mukasey, a retired federal judge whose confirmation until recently seemed like a sure thing and had been championed by a leading Democratic senator, Charles E. Schumer of New York.
But the effort also suggests that the White House believes it can combat criticism of Mr. Mukasey and his views by appealing to public concern about terrorism.
With leading Democrats like Mr. Schumer giving Mr. Mukasey positive reviews at the outset the White House hoped to use the Mukasey nomination to mend the bitter partisan feelings left by the resignation of Alberto R. Gonzales as attorney general. Now Mr. Schumer says he is undecided, the top Democratic presidential candidates say they will oppose the nomination, and any hope of bipartisan support has been all but erased.
The nomination has not moved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee — a panel vote is expected Tuesday — and the committee could decide to keep Mr. Mukasey from receiving a vote on the Senate floor. Mr. Mukasey’s biggest obstacle is his refusal to declare whether he believes a particularly controversial technique known as waterboarding is illegal and a form of torture.
One Republican consulted on the nomination said the White House realized only recently that confirmation was in doubt, and had debated whether it was wise to risk a partisan backlash by having the president weigh in.
“Everybody understands that there’s a price to be paid for the president upping the ante,” the Republican said. “The price is, you put pressure on the Democrats to have a committee action, and you basically do a warning shot to Republicans, including people like McCain and Graham. The flip side of it is you’re making it far more partisan, so nobody’s expecting now that the vote will be 90 to 0.”
The warning shot may have done Mr. Bush some good, at least with Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, both of whom have condemned waterboarding as torture. They issued a joint statement Thursday saying they would vote for Mr. Mukasey.
“Once he is confirmed, however,” the statement added, “we strongly urge that he publicly make clear that waterboarding is illegal and can never be employed.”
The senior Republican on the judiciary panel, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said in an interview Thursday that the White House was right to be concerned about the nomination.
Mr. Specter said he was trying to persuade the administration to brief Judiciary Committee members on the C.I.A. program, so that “we can talk it out amongst ourselves and try to come to a consensus.” But he said Mr. Bush’s aides had been “noncommittal.”
Among Democrats and their outside allies, support for Mr. Mukasey is dwindling. In a sign of how much the debate has shifted, the Alliance for Justice, a liberal judicial advocacy group that had spoken kindly of Mr. Mukasey at first, said Thursday that it would oppose him.
“Based on his record as a judge, we had every expectation that he could show some independence from the administration,” Nan Aron, the group’s president, said in an interview. “But his testimony and his answers indicate that he’s really unwilling to distance himself from Bush’s illegal, unconstitutional policies.”
Mr. Bush, in the Oval Office meeting, declined to address waterboarding. “I’m not going to talk about techniques,” he said, adding, “My view is this: The American people have got to understand the program is important and the techniques used are within the law.”
Waterboarding, a centuries-old method that simulates a feeling of drowning, has become a symbol of the larger debate over the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program, and the Mukasey nomination has become a kind of proxy fight for that battle. Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney made the war on terror and the C.I.A. program a central theme of their speeches on Thursday, with Mr. Cheney suggesting that the agency’s efforts had spared Americans another terrorist attack.
“Because we’ve been focused, because we’ve refused to let down our guard, we’ve done — gone more now than six years without another 9/11,” the vice president said, addressing the American Legion in Indianapolis.
Mr. Bush, for his part, took after Congress on a variety of fronts, accusing lawmakers of delaying not only the Mukasey confirmation vote, but also passage of an emergency spending measure to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and legislation that would make permanent the administration’s domestic surveillance program.
“On too many issues,” Mr. Bush said, “Congress is behaving as if America is not at war.”
White House officials said it was Mr. Bush’s idea to invite reporters in for an informal “pen and pad” briefing, without television cameras, something the White House has not done before. Dana M. Perino, the press secretary, said aides to Mr. Bush had been discussing ways to make him more accessible to the press, and settled upon the Oval Office idea after Mr. Bush saw a photograph of President Dwight D. Eisenhower conducting a news conference there.
