Quote :

"'Rule of Law'? That's So '90s By E. J. Dionne Jr. Tuesday, October 18, 2005; A25 We are on the verge of an extraordinary moment in American politics. The people running our government are about to face their day -- or days -- in court. Those who thought investigations were a wonderful thing when Bill Clinton was president are suddenly facing prosecutors, and they don't like it. It seems like a hundred years ago when Clinton's defenders were accusing his opponents of using special prosecutors, lawsuits, criminal charges and, ultimately, impeachment to overturn the will of the voters. Clinton's conservative enemies would have none of this. No, they said over and over, the Clinton mess was not about sex but about "perjury and the obstruction of justice" and "the rule of law." The old conservative talking points are now inoperative. It's especially amusing to see former House majority leader Tom DeLay complain about the politicization of justice. The man who spoke of the Clinton impeachment as "a debate about relativism versus absolute truth" now insists that the Democratic prosecutor in Texas who indicted him on charges of violating campaign finance law is engaged in a partisan war. That's precisely what Clinton's defenders accused DeLay of championing in the impeachment battle seven years ago. DeLay's supporters say charges that he transferred corporate money illegally to local Texas campaigns should be discounted because "everybody does it" when it comes to playing fast and loose with political cash. That's another defense the champions of impeachment derided in the Clinton imbroglio. The most explosive legal case -- if special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald brings charges, and lawyers I've spoken with will be surprised if he doesn't -- involves Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove. A lot of evidence has emerged that they leaked information about Valerie Plame, a CIA employee married to Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had the nerve to question aspects of the administration's case for waging war on Saddam Hussein. Even if these administration heavies are not charged with improperly unmasking Plame, they could be in legal jeopardy if they are found to have made false statements to investigators about their role in the Plame affair. This case goes to the heart of how Republicans recaptured power after the Clinton presidency and how they have held on to it since. The strategy involved attacking their adversaries without pity. In the Clinton years, the attacks married a legal strategy to a political strategy. Since Bush took office, many of those who raised their voices in opposition to the president or his policies have found themselves under assault, although the president himself has maintained a careful distance from the bloodletting. In Wilson's case, the administration suggested that his hiring by the CIA to investigate claims that Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear material was an act of nepotism, courtesy of his wife. But administration figures wanted to wipe their fingerprints off any smoking gun that would link them to the anti-Wilson campaign. Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who went to jail to protect Libby until she got what she took to be a release from a confidentiality agreement, offered a revealing fact in an account of her saga in Sunday's Post. Before he trashed Wilson to Miller in a July 8, 2003, meeting, Libby asked that his comments not be attributed to a "senior administration official," the standard anonymous reference to, well, senior administration officials. Instead, he wanted his statements attributed to a "former Hill staffer," a reference to Libby's earlier work in Congress. Why would Libby want his comments ascribed to such a vague source? Miller says she told the special prosecutor that she "assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson." These cases portray an administration and a movement that can dish it out, but want to evade responsibility for doing so and can't take it when they are subjected to the same rule book that inconvenienced an earlier president. An editorial in the latest issue of the conservative Weekly Standard is a sign of arguments to come. The editorial complains about the various accusations being leveled against DeLay, Libby, Rove and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and it says that "a comprehensive strategy of criminalization had been implemented to inflict defeat on conservatives who seek to govern as conservatives." I have great respect for my friends at the Weekly Standard, so I think they'll understand my surprise and wonder over this new conservative concern for the criminalization of politics. A process that was about "the rule of law" when Democrats were in power is suddenly an outrage now that it's Republicans who are being held accountable. postchat@aol.com"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/17/AR2005101701165_pf.html

Payback's a bitch.

10/18/2005 9:28:06 AM

Don't you know? Rule of Law is only an issue when you're in the minority. If you're the ruling party, it no longer applies to you.

10/18/2005 10:05:17 AM

Right, because underlings being indicted on trumped up charges is always comparable to the commander and chief pleading guilty on felony charges.

10/18/2005 12:56:29 PM

^ Maybe so, but those with the threat of indictment hanging over them are key players in the Republican Party. Not saying that the Republicans are any worse than the Democrats (which are equally corrupt), but because they are the ruling party right now, more attention is focused on them.

10/18/2005 1:59:25 PM

^ Surely yes. But call me when Bush is finally indicted, the jackass.

10/18/2005 2:40:04 PM

Joe Wilson may sue the White House.

Quote :

"Plamegate: The civil war Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson are considering a civil suit against administration officials. If they do sue, they'd better be ready for a vicious attack by White House proxies. By Michael Scherer Photo by AP/Wide World Joseph Wilson Oct. 18, 2005 | Within days, if not hours, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case will announce the outcome of his two-year investigation. But Patrick Fitzgerald probably won't have the last word. For months now, ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, the covert CIA agent unmasked by the White House, have been preparing to file a civil lawsuit against the Bush administration officials who disclosed her identity and scuttled her career. "There is no question that her privacy has been invaded. She was almost by definition the ultimate private person," said the couple's attorney, Christopher Wolf, of the law firm Proskauer Rose, on Monday. "Suffice it to say, they have been substantially damaged, economically and personally." He said the couple would make a final decision on filing a lawsuit after Fitzgerald has completed his investigation. If they do sue, Wilson and Plame could be the first litigants to depose senior White House officials since Paula Jones, an employee of the state of Arkansas, opened a can of worms by suing President Bill Clinton for allegedly exposing himself in a Little Rock hotel room. In a deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton lied under oath about his relationship with another woman, Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, triggering his impeachment by the House of Representatives and the disclosure of oral sex in the Oval Office. "The questions can range far afield. You can ask all kinds of stuff," said Gilbert Davis, an attorney who represented Jones in her sexual harassment lawsuit. "You can start free-wheeling with all kinds of discovery methods." Such discovery would be invaluable for historians -- and political partisans -- if Fitzgerald decided not to return indictments by Oct. 28, the day the grand jury investigating the leak of Plame's name to the press is scheduled to be dismissed. Though Democrats in Congress have requested a report from Fitzgerald on his findings, legal observers say Fitzgerald is under no obligation to provide one if he decides that no crimes were committed. The possibility of greater public disclosure has not escaped the notice of Wolf, the attorney for Wilson and Plame. "By its nature a civil case is somewhat more transparent than a criminal case," he said. Advertisement Wolf is a close personal friend of the couple's, having lived for years next door to them in the outskirts of Washington. His cousin, Audrey Wolf, served as a literary agent for Joseph Wilson's bestselling memoir, "The Politics of Truth." In an Op-Ed published in USA Today this summer, Wolf wrote that he was "collecting facts for any eventual civil suit" on the couple's behalf. Early this week, Bloomberg reported that Wilson said he may file a civil suit against Bush, Dick Cheney and others, "seeking damages for the alleged harm done to Plame's career." Wilson, who could not be reached by Salon for comment for this story, wrote in "The Politics of Truth" that his wife was "crestfallen" when she discovered that syndicated columnist Robert Novak had disclosed her identity as a CIA "operative." Click here "She would never be able to regain the anonymity and secrecy that her professional life had required; she would not be able to return to her discreet work on some of the most sensitive threats to our society in the foreseeable future, and perhaps ever," he wrote. In some ways, the Paula Jones case clears the way for a lawsuit by Plame and Wilson. In 1997 the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision giving the green light to Paula Jones' lawsuit against Clinton, despite the fact that he was a sitting president. The court ruled that Jones' allegations, which involved personal conduct during Clinton's years as a governor, were not protected by any claims of executive immunity. After much legal wrangling, Clinton finally settled with Jones in 1998 for $850,000, though he offered neither an apology nor an admission of guilt. (Clinton's top lawyer in that case was Robert Bennett, who is representing New York Times reporter Judith Miller in the CIA leak investigation.) However, there is one constitutional defense that senior White House officials, or at least Bush, could attempt to use. In a 1982 case, Nixon v. Fitzgerald (no relation to the current special prosecutor), the Supreme Court found, in a split decision, that a president enjoys "absolute immunity from damages liability predicated on his official acts." It is not clear whether this immunity extends to the vice president or senior White House aides, or if the White House could claim that discussions of Plame's identity should be viewed as an "official act." Most likely, the White House would try to litigate any civil case in the court of public opinion. One attorney from the Jones case, John Whitehead, said that the White House would likely renew its attacks against Wilson and Plame, working through intermediaries. "They shift the focus from the wrongdoer to the non-wrongdoer," said Whitehead, who works at the Rutherford Institute, a conservative civil rights group. (Some might argue that this strategy is now being played out in the Texas prosecution of Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, on charges of money laundering and conspiracy. Republican supporters, and DeLay himself, have spent weeks attacking the prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, and have even filed a suit against him for misconduct.) "This is a media case," said Whitehead, adding that the attorney for Wilson and Plame had better be ready for a fight. "There will be people saying things about them that they have never heard before." "

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/18/plame_probe/index_np.html

10/18/2005 11:56:41 PM