The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote. After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

Townsend and Rumsfeld’s office respond to his allegations:

Frances Frago Townsend, who coordinated homeland security matters at the National Security Council under President Bush, said that Ridge is “absolutely wrong” in contending that electoral politics ever played a role in raising or lowering the threat level.
It was Townsend who established the process that led to the Homeland Security Council making recommendations to President Bush. The meetings, she said today, were often intense, and cabinet secretaries often disagreed with one another. (Incidentally, Karl Rove was never in any meeting to discuss the threat level, according to Townsend.)
After the debate, Townsend would bring the counsel’s consensus recommendation to President Bush. “Never in almost five years at the White House was I aware of the president doing anything but accepting the recommendation of the council,” she said. “Politics played no part in any discussion of the council. And I think the president was better served by virtue of the debate that took place.”
As to the specific allegation that Townsend ordered Ridge to insert a line in a speech linking homeland security priorities to Iraq, Townsend said that Ridge had sent the speech in question to the White House, asking for advice. “So I called him said, here’s what I think should go in it. It wasn’t an order. I didn’t regularly see his speeches in advance. He made speeches all the time without running it by us.” Late today, a spokesman for former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that a discussion of the terrorist threat levels was amply justified by the public statements of Al Qaeda members at the time.
” The storyline advanced by his publisher seemingly to sell copies of the book is nonsense. During the fall of 2004, Usama bin Laden and an American member of al-Qaida released videotapes that said in no uncertain terms that al-Qaida intended to launch more attacks against Americans. ‘The streets of America will run red with blood,’ al-Qaida warned. Given those facts, it would seem reasonable for senior administration officials to discuss the threat level. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible had that discussion not taken place.”

I wasn’t in the room. But how can someone whose title is director of homeland security not resign if he believes the security of the homeland is being compromised in some way by the White House? How do you wait all these years before saying something?

Rough transcript from CNN this morning:

Townsend: Tom Ridge knew very well that I agreed with him that I didn’t believe there was a basis to raise the threat level, but I knew there were others in the homeland security council that did believe that and we agreed we’d have the conversation. By the way, what Tom Ridge’s book doesn’t say is the most eloquent case for not raising the threat level was not made by Tom, in fact it was made by secretary of state at the time, Colin Powell, and Bob Muller at personal risk, remember his boss John *shcroft was advocating to raise it based on the facts of the intelligence. Bob Muller himself made an eloquent case not to raise it.