Former President of Common Cause Is Talking Impeachment: Will Group Take A Position?

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/28890

Former President of Common Cause Is Talking Impeachment: Will Group Take a Position?

Will McClellan Be John Dean to Bush’s Richard Nixon?

By John Nichols, www.thenation.com

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’s 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.

MORE

on board the Impeachment Train (!).

:)

This is good.

:toast:

:patriot:

Thanks Madame Squeaker.

Our National Self Respect remains "off the table."

===

Interested in helping the one Congressperson who submitted a resolution to impeach Dick Cheney?

Some concerned citizens are organizing a one-day online fundraiser for Dennis. This is a grassroots effort. (We are not affiliated with the Kucinich campaign, and we are not being paid to do this.)

Our goal is to get 100,000 people to commit to donate $100 each to Dennis Kucinich on December 15, 2007, for a total one-day contribution of $10 million to his 2008 presidential campaign. Of course, any amount is welcomed on the day. Participants will contribute *only* on the official dennis4president.com web site.

Please pledge now:

http://www.december152007.com/

Tell friends. To make this a success, we need huge participation.

Thank you!