Must Watch Video

This is the video of the dramatic Comey testimony about how the White House committed a Felony:



This story is astounding and gaining steam. A knowledgeable reader from Josh Marshall's site says this:

Trust the Washington press corps to lunge for the process story, and ignore the substance.

When the warrantless wiretap surveillance program came up for review in March of 2004, it had been running for two and a half years. We still don't know precisely what form the program took in that period, although some details have been leaked. But we now know, courtesy of Comey, that the program was so odious, so thoroughly at odds with any conception of constitutional liberties, that not a single senior official in the Bush administration's own Department of Justice was willing to sign off on it. In fact, Comey reveals, the entire top echelon of the Justice Department was prepared to resign rather than see the program reauthorized, even if its approval wasn't required. They just didn't want to be part of an administration that was running such a program.

This wasn't an emergency program; more than two years had elapsed, ample time to correct any initial deficiencies. It wasn’t a last minute crisis; Ashcroft and Comey had both been saying, for weeks, that they would withhold
approval. But at the eleventh hour, the President made one final push, dispatching his most senior aides to try to secure approval for a continuation of the program, unaltered.

I think it’s safe to assume that whatever they were fighting over, it was a matter of substance. When John Ashcroft is prepared to resign, and risk bringing down a Republican administration in the process, he’s not doing it for kicks. Similarly, when the President sends his aides to coerce a signature out of a desperately ill man, and only backs down when the senior leadership of a cabinet department threatens to depart en masse, he’s not just being stubborn.

That top escelon included John Ashcroft, not known as a bastion of civil liberties, who told Comey through his chief of staff that he didn't want to be "left behind" when Comey resigned.

I don't give a good goddamned how long Bush has left in office. It's time for Congress to move forward with some accountability of these clowns. Someone like Abu, Cheney, Rove and Bush need to be removed and held criminally liable. Without it, the weakness of the Constitution is affirmed and the violence done to American government will be very difficult to every recapture.