High Crimes & Misdemeanors

[Nbadan]

Published on Monday, August 28, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
JonBenét Died - And Bush Lied?
by Thom Hartmann

I was on the air doing my radio program two weeks ago when the story came down the wire that the killer of JonBenét Ramsey had been captured in Thailand just hours earlier. I opened the microphone and said words to the effect of, "Today there must be something really awful going down for the Republicans. Maybe Rove really will be indicted. Maybe Cheney. Maybe some terrible revelation about Bush. And if there isn't, today will be the day they'll toss out the unsavory stories - like gutting an environmental law or wiping out pension plans - that they don't want covered."

Apparently it was worse than I'd imagined.

That same morning - just hours after the JonBenét information hit the press and just after I got off the air - it was revealed that US District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor had ruled that George W. Bush and now-CIA Director Michael Hayden had committed multiple High Crimes, Misdemeanors, and felonies, both criminal and cons utional. If her ruling stands, Bush and Hayden could go to prison.

As Judge Taylor said in her "ACLU v. NSA" decision (available here): "In this case, the President has acted, undisputedly, as FISA forbids."

When somebody acts "as FISA forbids," the law is pretty clear about the penalties. As you can read here, when somebody - anybody - breaks the FISA law, they are subject to "a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both."

Further, in the case of a president or NSA director, the law specifies that federal agents and courts have the authority to arrest and prosecute: "There is Federal jurisdiction over an offense under this section if the person committing the offense was an officer or employee of the United States at the time the offense was committed."

Judge Taylor went on to point out that Bush had not only broken the law, but that he had also violated the Cons ution - which many legal scholars would suggest is clearly an impeachable offense. In Judge Taylor's words:

"The President of the United States, a creature of the same Cons ution which gave us these Amendments , has undisputedly violated the Fourth in failing to procure judicial orders as required by FISA, and accordingly has violated the First Amendment Rights of these Plaintiffs as well."

Common Dreams

Dubya commited about 30 felonies, each one impeachable. At least that's what Thom Hartmann said on his radio program this morning. During her Press Conference on August 29, 2006, District Attorney Mary Lacey's office said that the announcement of their investigation of Karr in Thailand was made public as a result of a cable between the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. State Department. Lacey's office strongly suggested that the Bush Administration was responsible for the leak of the Karr investigation.

[AFE7FATMAN]

In response to the liberal judge and NBAdan
A conservative view point;, i.e. NOT GUILTY


How can you tell U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's opinion slapping down the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program is a piece of results-based jurisprudence that only a judicial activist—or the fiercest critics of the NSA program—could love?

Is the fact that President Carter appointed Taylor to the federal bench or that the Detroit Free Press once described her as "a liberal with Democratic roots" a sign? No, although that certainly slaps a big "bears investigating" note on the judge's opinion. The evidence of results-driven judicial overreaching is in—and not in—the opinion itself.

Start with Taylor's hot verbiage. A bit of rhetorical razzmatazz is one thing, but her opinion is shot through with rhetoric that would be more suitable to a MoveOn.org rally. "There are no hereditary kings in America," she writes, "and no powers not created by the Cons ution."

Well, fine. President Bush isn't claiming powers not created in the Cons ution, and the "hereditary" jazz just gives Taylor's game away. A judge who ramps up the rhetoric better have the analysis to pull it off. But Taylor's opinion is almost all at ude and assertion. Her analysis is nonexistent when it's not lame.

Taylor writes that the Fourth Amendment "requires prior warrants for any reasonable search, based upon prior-existing probable cause, as well as a particularity as to persons, places, and things, and the interposition of a neutral magistrate between executive branch enforcement officers and citizens." In fact, a warrant is not always required even in exclusively domestic cases. There are exceptions where warrants are not required. The Fourth Amendment protects against "unreasonable searches" and then goes on to set out the requirements of warrants issued on probable cause. The key to the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness.

She spends just a few pages on the administration's inherent-powers argument and manages to misstate that: "The government appears to argue here that ... particularly because the president is designated commander in chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Cons ution, itself."

That may be how it appears to Taylor. That certainly makes a nifty sound bite. But that's not the government's argument at all. Its position is not that the president's inherent powers as commander in chief allow him to violate the Cons ution. Those inherent powers, the government argues, are part of the Cons ution itself. In addition, the NSA program, far from violating the laws of Congress, is consistent with Congress' Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Section 109 says it's unlawful to conduct electronic surveillance "except as authorized by statute") read in conjunction with its Authorization for Use of Military Force Resolution.

It's hard to offer a real critique of an argument you're unwilling to state correctly in the first place.

No wonder Taylor's opinion was met with groans even from those who think the NSA program may be unlawful. The Washington Post found it "neither careful nor scholarly" and "unhelpful ... in evaluating ... the program's legality." Orin Kerr, a George Washington University Law School professor, told The New York Times the opinion was "just a few pages of general ruminations about the Fourth Amendment (much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect)."

What's most telling, however, is the dog that doesn't bark in Taylor's opinion. She fails to mention a case that came years after Congress passed FISA, a case handed down by the FISA court of review. Not even in a footnote. Here's the money quote from the FISA court of review's 2002 "In Re Sealed Case" opinion: "The Truong court, as did all the other courts ... held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the president's cons utional power."

It's easy to see why Taylor took a pass on this.
By DAVID REINHARD

BTW who cares about the leak of the Karr investigation-The investigation was nothing
more than a D.A. with an agenda, and a good one at that.

[RandomGuy]

Bush could be found driving around at 4am with white powder around his nose and a dead hooker in the trunk, and there would still be people who would say "it really wasn't that bad"

[ChumpDumper]

Congress gave him the power to kill hookers.

[pussyface]

Congress gave him the power to kill hookers.

you have struck again.

very, very funny.
this one made me laugh out loud. keep it up! your ass is funny enough to write for jay leno, or even the legend himself, Dane Cook! (Tourgasm MFers!)

[ChumpDumper]

Keep your stalking in the troll forum.

[PixelPusher]

Dubya commited about 30 felonies, each one impeachable.

Hmm...I don't know. It's bad, sure, but is it "perjury regarding oral sex" bad?