Prosecutor Scandal Is the Beginning of Bush’s End

The trail of breadcrumbs in the US attorney scandal starts at the Department of Justice, goes into the White House and heads right down the halls into the Oval Office.

By Larry Beinhart, alternet.org

About a year from now, pundits and instant historians will point back at the firing of the federal prosecutors and say, “That’s where the impeachment began.”

I’m glad that it began with, or at least around, Alberto.

The attorney general takes an oath to uphold the constitution and execute the law. When controversial matters come up, his role, traditionally, is often to be the guy who says, “We can’t do that, it’s against the law.”

Gonzales took a different approach. He brought the ethics of a corporate lawyer to his office. He took it to be his job to find, or invent, a theory that would allow the administration to go forward. If the theory wouldn’t hold up in court, or made little sense, that didn’t matter. They could still maintain, with straight faces, that they believed what they were doing, on the advice of the attorney general, was legal and constitutional. If worst came to worst, they’d back off and move on, so long as the profit outweighed the penalty.

…From Prosecutorgate, every road leads to impeachment. And it’s right that it started with Alberto.

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