Witnesses leery of testifying while Roberts stays on White House investigation

Witnesses leery of testifying while Roberts stays on leak investigation:

"Two witnesses interviewed by the FBI in its probe of classified information leaked from a joint congressional inquiry in 2002 say they are very concerned about cooperating with a Senate Ethics Committee review of the matter because Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) has not recused himself from the review.

Roberts is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Good-government advocates have called on Roberts to recuse himself from the committee’s probe into the leak case, which the Justice Department referred to it last summer.

The witnesses are reluctant to cooperate with the ethics panel because, they said, the FBI’s investigation focused on Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who at the time was the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, and because Shelby’s former staff director Bill Duhnke and deputy staff director Jim Hensler now serve as Roberts’s top aides on Intelligence.

The Washington Post reported last August that federal investigators concluded that Shelby had divulged classified intercepted messages to the media in 2002 during the joint House-Senate inquiry into the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."