By William H. Seewald, Amarillo Globe-News, May 25, 2007
25 May 2007 // "It's Watergate without the break-in or the bagmen."
- Marie Cocco, Washington Post Columnist
The past few weeks have offered some truly stunning insights into the scope of Bush administration lawlessness. The White House stonewalls on information requests and resists cooperation, but the six-year Republican hiatus on congressional oversight has made quite the dramatic turn around.
Certainly many Americans remain deeply concerned ever since the well-planned effort to steal the 2000 election culminated in Bush's installation by judicial fiat.
While a Republican congressional majority protected the Bushies, the administration manipulated fear and "national security" into a pervasive veil of secrecy. With our corporate media much more focused on shareholder value than shining light on Washington corruption, the alarming dimensions of what we haven't known only now is becoming clear through congressional investigations.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' blank, Mona Lisa smile turns sinister.
Observing congressional testimony, you're left to conclude that Gonzales either is the most incompetent executive in human history or the sort of bald-faced liar who gains Bushies such undying loyalty from the president. His passive grin, almost blanket memory lapse and professed absence from the decision-making and supervisory roles of his office haven't been resoundingly convincing.
Last week, at the same time Gonzales was delivering a speech at the National Press Club blaming his former deputy for the political purge of eight U.S. attorneys, Justice Department No. 2, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee delivering some of the most riveting testimony we've heard since Watergate.
It turns out that the Bush administration equivalent of Watergate's "Saturday Night Massacre" was threatened over then-White House counsel Gonzales and the president's chief of staff trying to strong-arm a bedridden Attorney General John Ashcroft into signing off on the administration's illegal wiretap program to spy on American citizens.
The FBI director, the assistant attorney general, as well as Ashcroft himself all apparently were prepared to resign en masse rather than lend support to the wiretap program. The White House instituted the program anyway, intervening a couple of weeks later with modifications (still secret) that apparently assuaged the Justice Department.
It's far from clear whether this "revolt" was fueled by a principled objection to a program that was just one more instance in the administration's long subversion of the rule of law, or simply some savvy lawyers' rank fear that their behinds would be in serious legal hot water by signing off on such a thing.
The election-year purging of U.S. attorneys has blown up on the Bushies in a way domestic spying never quite has. Gonzales first blamed his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson. Then he turned on the deputy attorney general after Comey started turning "state's evidence" in congressional hearings.
The election-year purge of U.S. attorneys was abjectly political. Directed by the White House, they dished out retribution for prosecuting Republican corruption or displaced those who wouldn't cooperate in a long-term effort to undermine the American electoral process.
The byword was "voter fraud." The claims were unsubstantiated in virtually every instance. What they actually did was disenfranchise or "cage" likely Democratic voters and shift outcomes in close swing states.
We already knew Gonzales was willing to construe the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions however Dick Cheney ordered, but the degree to which he was willing to politicize the whole apparatus of the Justice Department is unprecedented. He deserves impeachment.
You'd better know Dubya will go to the mat to keep him. A successor might be too independent, too committed to upholding the rule of law - the same offenses that got at least eight U.S. attorneys fired - and the Bushies were looking at everyone.
Bush administration corruption far exceeds anything perpetrated by Dick Nixon.
The government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, estimated in an April report that as many as 5 million White House e-mails are missing - a violation of the Presidential Records Act and almost certainly a massive effort to obstruct justice. The White House hasn't provided a single document to the Senate Judiciary Committee nor allowed any subpoenaed official to testify.
A disastrous and foolish war based on cooked intelligence and lies with tens of thousands of U.S. casualties ought to be enough to impeach the president himself. Polling shows half of Americans think he should be impeached if he lied about the war, but there's little impeachment appetite in Washington this late in the game - especially with the administration doing such an effective job of imploding.
Jerry Ford may have genuinely though it was the right thing to pardon Richard Nixon. But if Nixon had suffered real legal consequences for his crimes, perhaps someone of George W. Bush's ilk would be given pause before stomping on American liberty and justice the way this administration has.