Democrats: Fire SEC Chairman Pitt

WASHINGTON -- Democratic leaders on Wednesday asked President Bush to remove Harvey Pitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whom they accuse of opposing a tough candidate to head a new oversight board at the accounting industry's behest.

The White House called the accusations politically motivated. The call for Pitt's resignation came from Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., at a news conference on Social Security in which they tried to switch the dominant political focus away from possible war with Iraq.

Daschle and Gephardt told Bush in a letter that Pitt's "repeated insensitivity suggests an arrogant indifference to the appearance of conflicts of interest."

Pitt is "giving the accounting industry a veto over who will head the new board," Daschle told reporters. "This is exactly the kind of abuse the new board was created to prevent."

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer dismissed the charges.

"It's an old, tired cry," Fleischer said, citing what he said was the SEC's record number of enforcement actions and its confiscation of corrupt executives' illicitly earned money. "I think it's a political charge that has no merit and substance," he said.

Daschle and other Democrats already had called for Pitt to resign earlier this year, but so did a leading Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Rep. Michael Oxley, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was blunter, calling Daschle and Gephardt's letter to Bush "amazingly hypocritical."

Oxley, who has been identified as the key GOP lawmaker allied with the accounting industry in opposing John Biggs to head the new board, said the Democrats "actively promote the candidacy of one individual."

Bush, who appointed Pitt in spring 2001 to head the market watchdog agency, has stood by him.

Pitt, who previously represented Wall Street's big players and all Big Five auditing firms as a private securities lawyer, is back in the hot seat in a year of corporate accounting scandals that started with the collapse of Enron Corp.

He was criticized last spring for meeting privately with the heads of companies under investigation by the SEC, and the watchdog group Common Cause demanded his resignation.