Karl Rove was one of two White House aides sub-poenaed by the Senate judiciary committee yesterday in a rapidly escalating confrontation between the Bush administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress.

Mr Rove, President Bush’s closest adviser, received the summons just one hour after a group of Democratic senators had demanded that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, America’s most senior legal officer and a member of Mr Bush’s inner circle, be investigated for perjury.

Mr Gonzales this week insisted, under oath, that a Congressional briefing in 2004 had nothing to do with a terrorist surveillance programme which allows the government to eavesdrop on suspects without court approval.

But a letter from then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, circulated by the Democrats yesterday, suggested the meeting had been about just this issue.

Charles Schumer, a leading Democratic Senator, said Mr Gonzales had lied. “He took an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Instead he tells the half truth, the partial truth, and everything but the truth. And he does it not once, not twice, but over and over and over again. His instinct is not to tell the truth, but to dissemble and deceive.” Mr Gonzales, whose position has come under fire from both Republicans and Democrats, is also at the centre of the sub-poena controversy. Judiciary committees in both Houses of Congress are investigating whether the decision to sack nine federal prosecutors serving under Mr Gonzales at the Department of Justice was politically motivated.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives judiciary committee voted to cite White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and the president’s former legal adviser, Harriet Miers, with contempt of Congress for refusing to answer sub-poenas. The White House, which has offered thousands of pages of evidence but refuses to allow its staff to be summoned to Congress, has invoked the principle of executive privilege and the issue is likely to end up in court.

Spokesman Tony Fratto said, “Every day congressional Democrats prove that they’re more interested in headlines than doing the business Americans want them to do. And Americans are now taking notice that this Congress, under Democratic leadership, is failing to tackle important issues.” But yesterday’s decision to sub-poena Mr Rove, along with deputy political director Scott Jennings, showed that the Democrats have no intention of backing down in a dispute which could have significant consequences for the ability of both Congress and Mr Bush to achieve anything before the 2008 elections.

The danger for Mr Bush is it could set more Republicans against the administration at a time when he desperately needs their support to shore up his position on other issues, chiefly Iraq.

Senator Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, told reporters aboard Air Force One that he might raise the issue of Mr Gonzales’s future with President Bush.

The hearing two days ago was “devastating” for the Attorney General, he said. “But so was the hearing before that and so was the hearing before that.”

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