More on Pardons

That there's a precedent for one president revoking the pardon of a previous president is hopeful news for someone, like me, who believes that Bush and Cheney should die in prison cells.

KT
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What I see and I know others won't agree with me is the Obama team trying to give the Justice Dept the opportunity to pursue charges against the Bush Administration without making it look like it was at their direction. I don't think its a coincidence that the Senate Armed Services report came out just as the Bush Administration is getting ready to leave office.. See if Obama comes out and says he wants Bush prosecuted he will.
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1. Lose political capital with a lot of people who think he is just being vengeful and not really being about change.
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2. Look like he is politicizing the Legislative Branch just like Bush did.
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3. Risk losing even more political capitol if the prosecutions fail to get a guilty verdict against any Bush Administration figures.
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But if the DOJ comes out and prosecutes Bush all on their own then Obama can simply say that he is all about law and justice and let the chips fall where they may. He loses nothing in that proposition because the average person believes in our justice system even if that faith is many times misguided. Now I am not saying that its guaranteed that the DOJ will prosecute Bush but I AM saying that Obama is handling it exactly right if he does want them to prosecute Bush. I think it would be dumb as all hell for Obama to come out and say he wants them prosecuted. What gives me hope is that if they DIDN'T want him prosecuted then surely they would have said that but recently Biden said nothing is off the table. And that is what makes me believe that while it might not happen immediately, eventually many people in the Bush Administration will have their day of reckoning in court.
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Also from the other thread KT you said I assume that Bush will give out some big name pardons and I don't necessarily, thats why I used the word if in my commment. HOWEVER recently a WH spokesman refuted the meme that Bush won't be issuing a flurry of pardons. Here is a link to the thinkprogress article on the exchange but I encourage everyone to go to thinkprogress.org because they have two or three articles up right now on the subject of that revoked pardon.
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http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/23/bush-more-pardons/

KT, first, thanks for posting a blog that will run a gazillion before it is over. I doubt that a pardon can be overturned, either by the grantor, or by previous grantors. This is lawyers heaven. Can a pardon be granted to a dead person who cannot receive it?
Bush withdrawing the pardon priviously granted will be subject to maybe internable litigation, while the grantee remains in prison. I care?
Not. There are bigger matters at hand than this punk in prison. But I will enjoy watching the discussion over the next day or so, and thanks again for that.

#2 Should have said "look like he is politicizing the Judicial Branch.
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Too much Remy

What's Remy?

For me, it was too much turkey tryptophan. Fell asleep on the couch with relatives all around me visiting. Embarrassing.

I would love the power to pardon. Giving the unfairly jailed freedom sounds like a blast to me.

It'll be interesting to see how this case shakes out.

How does it all look from here?
- making a political contribution - mere $30,000 among the $millions in political contributions - unpardonable.

- selling our top military (aircraft) secrets to the enemy/foreigners and thus jeopardizing our national security - pardonable - no big deal.

OK. I got the wrong picture. What grinch stole the right one?

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Already the beltway press is lobbying to let the top officials of the Bush Administration off the hook for the crimes they committed while in office. That's what Karen means by "not seeing much appetite." She probably has no idea what "the appetite" is inside the Obama administration. The beltway elite have no respect for American law and many don't believe that those laws should apply to them and their social class, including the criminal bushies. Of course, no one enjoys seeing the people with whom they socialize charged with crimes, tried and convicted. But people outside that narrow little world of Washington DC understand that when people commit crimes, especially serious felonies, even if they are neighbors and cocktail buddies, they should be held to account for that. And that is particularly true for people who hold public office.
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Scott Horton makes the case in Harper's Magazine: Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration
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This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted “signing statements” that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.

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Horton goes on:
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Open criminality is a cancer on democracy. It implicates all who know of the conduct and fail to act. Such compliance presents a practical crisis, in that a government that is allowed to torture will inevitably transgress other legal limits. But it also presents an existential political crisis. Many democracies have simply collapsed as the people permitted their leaders to abandon the rule of law in the face of alleged external threats. The turn to torture was rapid, for instance, in Argentina at the time of the Dirty War and in Chile after the American-directed coup against Salvador Allende. In both cases, that turn had little to do with a perceived benefit from the use of torture in interrogation. To the contrary, the very criminality of the act had a talismanic significance. It asserted the primacy of the will of the torturer. It made the claim, for all to accept or reject, that the ruler was the law. Such a claim is, of course, intolerable to democracy, which presupposes, as Thomas Paine wrote, that “the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

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Read the whole thing. He lays the whole thing out.
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Remember, Cheney and Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz were Nixon operatives. So was George HW Bush. The Ford pardon of Nixon enabled them to burrow into the federal system, only to appear again and again in subsequent Republican Administrations. They learned with the Nixon Pardon and then with ABSCAM and Iran- Contra that the DC elite had no stomach for holding rightwing Republican operatives to account.
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And then Iran Contra crimes and Daddy Bush pardoned those felons, who also reappeared in 43's administration: Abrams, Poindexter. So you had a number of outright criminals from the past 40-odd years, having infested the federal government all those years, reappear in the second Bush Administration. And by then, they figured out that they could act with impunity, because the DC press elite has no stomach for seeing their friends and neighbors stand in the dock, no matter what the crime. It isn't the same for Democrats, however.
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Bill Clinton went on television and told the nation that he didn't have sex with Monica Lewinsky. For that he was impeached, to the gleeful delight of the beltway press; indeed, they aided and abetted the rightwing Whitewater jihad and the impeachment.
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Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice went on television for years and years repeating the outright lie "we don't torture" and then at the end it's all PSYCH!! Yes we did! And there "is no appetite" in DC to investigate those crimes or prosecute the public officeholders who committed them and lied about it.
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How sick, how profoundly depraved, are these people? As Horton notes at the link above "5. It is not without justification that Bush was able to claim in 2005, 'We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections.' Such taunts recall the (likely apocryphal) moment when William Tweed, the corrupt head of New York's Tammany Hall, was confronted with indisputable evidence of graft. 'Well,' he said, 'what are you going to do about it?'"
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Indeed so. As Bush told Martha Raddatz "Yeah? So what?"
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(well this is a rather slow-paced thread)

Mmm, my hope that Bush and Cheney get what they deserve hangs on whatever I can find to hang it on. The worst those creeps have done is probably not yet known, and perhaps the Justice Dept. will find the courage Congress lacked. There was a time when Obama was thought not to have a chance, either.
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I'm really liking Swampland under KT. It feels a bit like Froomkin's place at the Post.

To echo what hellslittleangel said, one of the best reasons to investigate the outgoing administration is simply to find out what we don't know. It's remarkable that the press, the organ nominally responsible for finding out what we don't know, should take so little interest.
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Maybe we can have a truth commission. Absolve Cheney if we will confess his actions and show contrition (yeah, right).

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Cheney must never be absolved of his crimes. That will only insure that another Republican will commit the same crimes, or worse, when they regain power. We saw that after Nixon, after Reagan/Bush I. All those criminals showed up in the present Bush Administration.
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The beltway press has no appetite for reporting the extent of crimes committed by the Bush Administration. (Many of them know, I'm pretty sure.) True, there is much we don't know. All we know is what reporters such as Risen and Lichtblau have written about, and remember the NYT spiked his domestic spying story for more than a year. We don't know what else the NYT is hiding, let alone what reporters and investigators haven't yet discovered.
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So this means it's really George Bush's fault that Marc Rich remains pardoned.
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But it really seems like a contradiction to "unpardon" somebody. Once an offense has been taken off the books through a pardon there's no crime to reinstate. Sort of double jeopardy. So I wonder if presidents after Grant just decided this was a bad precedent, or if it gradually got lost to history.
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Leave it to Bush to find a technicality to let him do what he wants, and mostly because he didn't want there to be an "appearance" of impropriety.
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formerly james: Toussie "has been out of jail for several years now, working as a real estate and marketing consultant" (Washington monthly). I think most pardons are given to people already out of prison.

I am disturbed at the "lack of appetite" for convicting people in politics who commit crimes. Heck, I don't like the fall gut attitude either. Typically, one person is named as the whole source of widespread corruption, and it is considered debased to actually pursue the situation past them.
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This is another facet of high Broderism that needs to go by the wayside. If the crimes of the Nixon administration, plus Iran-Contra were pursued in the way that say inner city crimes were pursued, many of the bad actors in the Bush administration wouldn't have been in power to do the bad things. Ruth Marcus I am looking at you.
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One of the values in this country I loathe is the quest to lock of poor criminals for a very long time, but to grant leniency to a Charles Keating, a Cap Weinberger, a Mike Milken, a Scooter Libby. Their kids go to school with the village kids. They have BBQ's on labor day. They don't deserve real punishment. That 20 year old "thug" in the hood deserves no mercy though.

KT, there always seems to be an excuse to excuse things though. Even if the economy miraculously turned around on January 20th, Iraq was bathed in flowers, there would be no appetite to prosecute and pursue the crimes of the Bush administration.
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I am not just blaming the DC press here. I KNOW that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have no appetite for it as well. It's just not done. Period. We still don't know who put the names of the US Attorneys on that list. We may never know. It's "the past". I just wish say, the people in prison for non violent drug offenses would get the same treatment as somebody who violated the constitution in office. It's the dichotomy that really annoys me. Somebody who abuses their authority has less to worry about than some nobody. But this is not exactly something new under the sun.

KT:
The press certainly bears some of the blame. If the press had hammered on the Bush thugs for real crimes the way they hammered on the Clintons for the fantasy crimes of Whitewater, Congress might have been pressured into doing its job.

But Karen, you can't very well deny that the DC press is starting to weigh in about this. Ruth Marcus, Joe Klein. Ruth Marcus made the preposterous assertion that we should just forget about all those crimes in order to assure that this would "never happen again." The Washington Post is granting op-ed space to people coming out of the woodwork to make the argument that we should "move on" and that these are such good-hearted people that we should overlook these "perfectly understandable" crimes. Los Angeles Times had an editorial urging the same thing Wednesday.
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I don't think you can make an argument that the DC press elite are irrelevant to the discussion.
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It may be fine to bring the bushies to the dock in the International Court for their war crimes, but that doesn't touch the domestic criminal activity, as outlined in the Scott Horton piece and elsewhere.
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This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted “signing statements” that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.

Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)
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Read it and weep.

Also, Karen, this is so ironic:
I'm just saying I don't see the forces at work to make it happen.
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You in the DC press just specialize in the passive voice when it serves you. All of a sudden, journos' job isn't to hold people accountable? Why, just the other day Mark Whitaker said (about Obama) "Our job is to hold him to account," adding that he thinks "we're going to have to get tougher." Or is that just Obama, not Bush and Cheney?
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What I am saying, Karen, is that there is very REAL "appetite" in the real world to hold these criminals to account. The DC press corps is actively working against that. Yes, Ruth Marcus has a column in the Washington Post, doesn't she? Does Scott Horton? No, he doesn't.
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What would you have me call the collective of people in Washington DC who have media platforms on which to expound their views and their reporting of the world around them? I'm not married to the term DC press corps, it is shorthand to me. If you give me a term which is less offensive to you, then I will use it.
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I really, really hope you get that pony, too.

KT, I agree about Waxman. I also forgot to point out that Obama has zero interest in pursuing Bush crimes. It does seem a bit one sided though. We got 12 hours of hearings into the christmas card list of Socks the cat. But to be fair, the Republicans gave up on that stuff the second Clinton left office. They just gave up on oversight all together.
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I for one don't blame the press corps for this attitude. I just however think that the only institution that could force D.C. to do the right thing is the press. It's a nuance, but it's there. Obama won't want to pursue war crimes for torture. Reid and Pelosi won't either. Without a full throated media demanding it, it won't happen. This is not blaming the press, it's just that the press has the only platform that could possibly create a will to do something.

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trifecta, or at least stop trying to scuttle the effort of others who would try to pursue these crimes.
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