It's August, so the tinfoil is out.
Sources close to the Chicago federal grand jury probe into perjury and obstruction charges against President Bush and others said indictments were handed down this week, but a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Illinois refused to comment.
Uh-huh. I grant you that it fits with the grim seriousness with which the special prosecutor has been working, but even so…
Don't even hope for this: Another presidential indictment would be bad, even one for something that mattered, like outing a CIA agent. (Impeachment, and perhaps indictment, for lying to start a war is different; that at least would be about an offense of suitably major proportions. But while that's surely a 'High Crime' I don't know if it violates the US Code.) An indictment and the fury it would cause risks distracting from, maybe even aborting what looks like it would otherwise be a substantial Democratic gain in the upcoming national elections. Not to mention that there's no one in the line of succession who seems likely to be in any way an improvement over the current Grand Vizier, Dick Cheney.
Mr. Froomkin,
Good grief, listen to yourself. What on earth would be serious enough, in your opinion, to risk ‘diverting’ our attention from politics?
Perhaps, he is thinking of the “unindicted conspirator” President Nixon precedent, and likes how that turned out better.
What I meant was that any indictment is going to cause controversy and passion among the defenders, and risks driving people who otherwise would be prepared to vote Democratic into a GOP bunker mentality.
I take your point, but have an observation or two. First, I can’t see how passions could be any more inflamed than they already are; and, as in the Schiavo case, when Republicans become too inflamed they seem to expose their extremism to the more moderate of the constituency, to their own detriment. Next, from the (tinfoil?) matter I’ve been reading on the web, Dick Cheney seems hell-bent on attacking Iran, and “Guns of August” soon, with nuclear weapons–(check the American Conservative website). If there is any element of truth in this, matters absolutely cannot get more serious, and the more quickly we bring this administration to account, by whatever legal means, the better. My hair is most assuredly on fire.
Given how heavily involved Cheney’s office was in getting the CIA to hew to the Correct Party Line, Cheney is at a lot more risk for being indicted than Bush.
Since the rules for classification are laid out by executive order, I would assume that Kissinger’s quip “I never leak; I de-classify” applies to Bush. Of course, he could still be on the hook for lying to Federal investigators.