A House panel Tuesday threatened Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey with contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena demanding FBI reports of an interview of Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the disclosure of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s covert status.

In a letter to Mukasey, Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said his committee will take up a contempt resolution July 16.

“You have neither complied with this subpoena by its returnable date nor asserted any privilege to justify withholding documents from the committee,” Waxman wrote.

Waxman said the committee would no longer seek access to the FBI report on an interview with President Bush as originally sought “in deference to your concerns and in a further attempt at accommodation.”

The subpoena had instructed Mukasey to comply by June 23. But the Justice Department said a day later that it would not “provide or make available any reports of interviews with the president or the vice president from the leak investigation.

“Communications of the president and the vice president with their staffs relating to official executive branch activities lie at the absolute core of executive privilege,” wrote Keith B. Nelson, the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legislative affairs.

The subpoena and potential contempt resolution stem from the publication of former White House spokesman Scott McClellan’s book, “What Happened,” in which McClellan asserts that White House staff misled him about whether senior administration officials had played any role in revealing Plame’s identity in 2003.

“This is a significant revelation and, if true, a serious matter,” Waxman wrote in a June 3 letter to Mukasey. “It cannot be responsibly investigated without access to the vice president’s FBI interview.”

Mukasey is scheduled to testify Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.