The title of this diary should be the day’s first thought (well for me it will be second after “damn, my wife still has a great ass”) for all American citizens. All of us who hop around the frog pond and read one another’s ideas and opinions know the reasons to impeach the current occupier of the Presidency: lying us into a war, incompetence and negligence in the failure to protect a major American city, advocating and carrying out torture, illegally and immorally detaining thousand of innocent people in Guantanamo, illegally outing a covert CIA operative, etc., etc. etc. ;The list is enormous.
However, the most important impeachable offense is the illegal wiretapping of American citizens. It is blatantly against the law. No matter how much Bush wants American citizens to buy his bullshit that the law is what he says it is whether in chicken-shit- behind-the-back signing statements or just in executive pronouncements, the plain fact is that we have a Constitution and a set of laws and Bush is subject to those laws as are we all. Impeaching Bush is simply holdling him accountable to the Constitution. The question of whether there are any people in the House with the courage to follow the lead of Dennis Kucinich (I can’t believe I have no idea how to spell the name of a Presidential candidate) and pass Articles of Impeachment.
The editors of The Nation wrote an editorial called Sick Justice in the current issue. The story of the sick AG courageously standing up to the carnivorous pair of Card and Gonzales, the so called ethical stands of Comey and Mueller and the revelation that Gonzales’s attempt to politicize the Justice Department, is a wonderful story but one which obscures as much as it illuminates.
The frantic race to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s bedside on March 10, 2004, sounds more Hollywood than history: Acting AG James Comey’s foot-to-the-floor drive to head off then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card; FBI Director Robert Mueller’s startling imperative to his agents to defy any attempt by Gonzo and Card to throw Comey out; the sedated and badly ailing Ashcroft rousing himself from his sickbed to defend the Constitution; the resignation threats by Comey and Mueller. As Washington lore, the episode joins Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre and Thaddeus Stevens’s being carried on a stretcher to vote in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. And behind all this, the President pushing a wiretap program so blatantly illegal that his own top Justice appointees were threatening to resign.
The histrionics of that night, recounted by Comey to the Senate Judiciary Committee after three years, further erode Alberto Gonzales’s already fatally compromised capacity to run the Justice Department. And they expose an internal Administration conflict between hyper-politicized operatives like Card, Gonzales and Karl Rove and Justice professionals like Comey–Bush appointees who nonetheless understood that their oath was to the Constitution. But there is also a risk that the drama of this good guys/bad guys confrontation–with Comey protecting his boss the way Michael Corleone took it on the chin for the Don at that lonely, dark hospital in The Godfather–is obscuring the real story: just how many ways the Bush Administration was finding to break the law, and just how high the chain of complicity ran:
Just how criminal is the Bush Administration. Well, it is at least this criminal.
1. After senior Justice Department officials had reviewed Bush’s illegal wiretapping scheme and determined that it was a blatant violation of the surveillance law,
Card, Gonzales and Bush himself all indicated their intention to go forward anyhow. In plain English, that is a conspiracy.
2. For two years Bush endorsed secret NSA wiretaps without a warrant under FISA.
In other words, for two years the NSA and telephone companies had been commiting a federal crime with the full endorsement of the White House.
3. The editors charge Bush with fraud. According to Comey’s testimony
the President himself called the wife of the critically ill Ashcroft and asked her to let Gonzales and Card visit his bedside. When they arrived they tried to persuade the sedated Ashcroft to approve the illegal taps. But Ashcroft had already signed over his AG authority to Comey, who consequently carried carried the title Acting Attorney General
Why is the statement I highlighted important? Because, according to Georgetown University law professor Marty Lederman, quoted by The Nation
this means that Bush, Gonzo, and Card were seeking the signature of Ashcroft, “who was not only incapacitated but not even acting in an official capacity.
This can only mean that Bush, Gonzales and Card had one purpose, what the editors call “a chilling motive:” As Lederman puts it,
Obviously, they did so in order that they could present a fraudulent certification, of soneone who was not at the time acting as AG, to the NSA and/or to the telecom companies.”,/blockquote>
In other words, Bush tried to get the signature to authorize his wiretapping program from somone who was not authorized to give it.
All of this illuminates the length to which the current occupier of the White House will go to destroy traditional American freedom. It’s time for him to leave, to not pass Go, to not kill one more American soldier or Marine, to leave so that we can begin to recover our moral standing in the world. It’s time for George to clear brush.
