May 22 (Bloomberg) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stood by her statement that the Central Intelligence Agency misled Congress about harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists and refused to discuss the political controversy triggered by her assertion.

“I stand by my comments,” Pelosi, a California Democrat, said today at a news conference in Washington. “I have made the statement that I’m going to make” and “I won’t have anything more to say about it.”

Pelosi’s May 14 assertion escalated a political dispute over her insistence that she was never briefed in 2002 about the use of waterboarding to simulate near-drowning. It drew a rebuttal from CIA Director Leon Panetta, who said agency records indicate Congress was “briefed truthfully.”

CIA spokesman George Little, asked to respond to Pelosi’s comments today, said in an e-mail, “The agency’s position is clear: It is not the policy or practice of the CIA to mislead the United States Congress.”

House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio has challenged Pelosi to either produce evidence to support her claim or retract her assertion that the CIA “misrepresented every step of the way” its use of harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists.

House Democrats yesterday blocked a Republican attempt to force a vote to authorize a bipartisan investigation of Pelosi’s charge.

Boehner Statement

In a statement today, Boehner accused Pelosi and House Democrats of “stonewalling a bipartisan investigation to determine the facts.”

After the news conference, Representative Xavier Becerra, a California Democrat and a member of Pelosi’s leadership team, was asked why there would be any harm in a bipartisan investigation.

Finding out “what happened with regard to torture” is “the first important element” of any inquiry into alleged CIA abuses of detainees during the Bush administration, Becerra said. “The focus will be on torture.”

Becerra described Republican attacks on Pelosi as an attempt to divert attention from the allegations of CIA abuse during the administration of former President George W. Bush.

Hoyer, Van Hollen

Along with Becerra, Pelosi was joined today at her news conference by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, and Representative Chris Van Hollen, another Marylander who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The three spoke for 25 minutes of the 30-minute session to outline legislative accomplishments of the last five months before taking questions.

“What we are doing is staying on our course” of pushing health-care and climate-change legislation, Pelosi said. She said those efforts won’t “be distracted” by Republican attacks.

Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said that by facing the press, Pelosi ensured that the controversy won’t fade as quickly as it would have if she had “let people leave Washington” for next week’s Memorial Day recess and “let this thing die a good peaceful death.”

“But holding press conferences and then refusing to speak about the topic everyone wants to talk about is like putting on a production of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark,” he said.

Gallup Poll

A Gallup Poll said Pelosi was “largely losing the public relations game” over CIA interrogations. The May 19 telephone survey said 47 percent disapproved of Pelosi’s handling of the issue and 31 percent approved of how she was dealing with it.

The survey of 997 adults also found that 45 percent disapproved of how Republicans in Congress handled the issue and 40 percent approved. By contrast, 59 percent told Gallup they approved of how Obama was handling the issue and 29 percent disapproved.

Outside the speaker’s ceremonial office, two aides to Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican, distributed a statement that the lawmaker was threatening to introduce another resolution attacking Pelosi after Congress returns from the recess.

Pelosi, an outspoken critic of Bush administration treatment of suspected al-Qaeda operatives seized after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has faced questions about what she knew about the spy agency’s interrogation tactics. The CIA used waterboarding to question three al-Qaeda suspects in U.S. custody.

Pelosi has said she was only told that Bush administration lawyers had decided waterboarding was legal, not that the technique was being used.

To contact the reporter on this story: James Rowley in Washington at jarowley@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 22, 2009 18:19 EDT