This must have felt like deja vu for Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). Three months after Roger Clemens famously accused former teammates of "misremembering" conversations about steroid use at a House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee hearing, the committee chairman yesterday heard similar tales of forgetting and not recalling from EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.

A day after committee staffers released a memo accusing Johnson of bowing to White House pressure over the California emissions waiver, yesterday's hearing focused mostly on other examples of political interference by the White House. Most notably, Waxman wanted to know how the Bush Administration managed to weaken the new smog standard over the recommendation of EPA's own Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee. Johnson also faced questions about caving to administration officials over the agency's ongoing deliberations on whether to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

As in the California waiver case, Johnson initially supported the tougher smog standards. And then came the meetings with executive branch officials -- President Bush included -- conversations that the EPA's embattled chief did not care to talk much about yesterday.

Johnson acknowledged meeting several times with White House officials, but that's where the candor ended. "I don't think it's appropriate for me to discuss the conversations," he said. When pressed, Johnson admitted to being directly overruled by Bush on one occasion, but would not elaborate.

The hot seat may get even hotter for Johnson tomorrow. The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has scheduled a vote on a resolution recommending that Johnson be found in contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a subpoena over the agency's failure to act on CO2 regulation, more than a year after the Supreme Court said it must do so. We're guessing Johnson actually remembers that ruling.