[Sosfbay-discuss] McClellan's bombshell & CheneyBush's impeachment

[Drew Johnson]

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=253417
Posted 11/21/2007 @ 12:33pm
Will McClellan Be John Dean to Bush's Richard Nixon?

Scott McClellan's admission that he unintentionally made false statements
denying the involvement of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Bush-Cheney
administration's plot to discredit former Ambassador Joe Wilson, along
with his revelation that Vice President Cheney and President Bush were
among those who provided him with the misinformation, sets the former
White House press secretary as John Dean to George Bush's Richard Nixon.

It was Dean willingness to reveal the details of what described as "a
cancer" on the Nixon presidency that served as a critical turning point in
the struggle by a previous Congress to hold the 37th president to account.

Now, McClellan has offered what any honest observer must recognize as the
stuff of a similarly significant breakthrough.

The only question is whether the current Congress is up to the task of
holding the 43rd president to account.

What McClellan has revealed, in a section from an upcoming book on his
tenure in the Bush-Cheney White House, is a stunning indictment of the
president and the vice president. The former press secretary is confirming
that Bush and Cheney not only knew that Rove, the administration's
political czar, and Libby, who served as Cheney's top aide, were involved
in the scheme to attack Wilson's credibility -- by outing the former
ambassador's wife, Valerie Plame, as a Central Intelligence Agency analyst
-- but that the president and vice president actively engaged in efforts
to prevent the truth from coming out.

"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his
behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house
briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the
better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most
aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby," writes McClellan
in an excerpt from his book, What Happened, which is to be published next
April by Public Affairs.

"There was one problem," the long-time Bush aide continues. "It was not
true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the
highest ranking officials in the administration "were involved in my doing
so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and
the president himself."

Much has been made about the fact that outing Plame as a CIA operative was
a felony, since knowingly revealing the identity of an intelligence asset
is illegal. And much will be made about the fact that McClellan's
statement links Bush and Cheney to the cover-up of illegal activities and
the obstruction of justice, acts that are themselves felonies.

But it is important to recognize that a bigger issue is at stake. If the
president and vice president knowingly participated in a scheme to attack
a critic of their administration -- Wilson had revealed that the White
House had been informed that arguments Bush and Cheney used for attacking
Iraq were ungrounded -- they have committed a distinct sort of offense
that the House Judiciary Committee has already determined to be grounds
for impeachment.

In the summer of 1974, Democrats and Republicans on the committee voted
overwhelmingly to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon for
having "repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights
of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and
the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing
agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies."

That second article of impeachment against Nixon detailed the president's
involvement in schemes to use the power of his position to attack
political critics and then to cover up for those attacks.

The current chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Michigan Democrat John
Conyers, voted for the impeachment of Nixon on those grounds.

Conyers and his colleagues need to recognize that, despite House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi's aversion to presidential accountability, McClellan's
statement demands the sort of inquiry and action that Dean's statements
regarding Nixon demanded three decades ago.

As former Common Cause President Chellie Pingree notes with regard to
Bush, "The president promised, way back in 2003, that anyone in his
administration who took part in the leak of Plame's name would be fired.
He neglected to mention that, according to McClellan, he was one of those
people. And needless to say, he didn't fire himself. Instead, he fired no
one, stonewalled the press and the federal prosecutor in charge of the
case, and lied through his teeth."

Pingree, a savvy government watchdog who is bidding for an open House seat
representing her native Maine, argues that the Judiciary Committee must
subpoena McClellan as part of a renewed investigation of the Wilson case.

She is right about that.

She is right, as well, when she concludes that, if what McClellan says is
true "it will call into question the legitimacy of the entire
administration. And we may see a changing of the guard at the White House
sooner than expected."

That changing of the guard -- via the Constitutional process of
impeachment and trial for their various and sundry high crimes and
misdemeanor -- is long overdue.

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John Nichols is the author of THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders'
Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy,
acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich
examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic
medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to
'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for
the defense of our most basic liberties.'"