Whitehouse joined those on the judiciary committee in supporting the subpoena. In the following statement, he expresses his exasperation with the response to the committee's request for documents:
Thursday, June 28, 2007 Washington, D.C. – In response to the Bush administration’s statement that it would not provide information subpoenaed by Congress in connection with the ongoing investigation into the firing late last year of several U.S. attorneys, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) delivered the following remarks at a business meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier today: . . . "It is not my understanding that executive privilege is driven subjectively by understandings of people involved. It relates to an actual executive privilege, and when it’s outside the executive, the argument gets very thin. . . . “From those elements, and we will obviously review it more closely, it seems to me there has not been a thoughtful or well-intentioned effort to accommodate the committee’s subpoena, but rather, as the chairman has so clearly said, a stonewall.”