Truth Detector

What a complete pile of Liberal bile. Keywords for a Liberal media who continues to distort the facts: "related to the administration's leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity in 2003."

Henry Waxman is one of the single BIGGEST Democrat whack jobs in congress and has done nothing but waste taxpayer money with his many useless witch hunts.

What makes such idiotic and fantastical stories so absurd is that the taxpayers of this country have already thrown away $40 million in a several year investigation where the special prosecutor found NOTHING to suggest that any laws were broken and obtained ONE indictment against Libby for lying under oath about not remembering where he heard the leak in a case where the SOURCE of the PRESUMED “leak” had been known all along.

This case is irrelevant, Waxman is irrelevant and the entire Democrat party is irrelevant; Bush and Cheney did not INVENT executive privilege and the notion that Waxman will find anything remotely close to a credible case to prosecute illustrates that Democrats continue to play divisive partisan politics with the taxpayer money for purely political purposes and partisan grandstanding.

If one wonders why Congress approval ratings have achieved and all-time low of 14%, all one need do is look at congress failure to work on any meaningful Bi-Partisan legislation, pass a balanced budget and continue to waste the taxpayers money on witch hunts with no other goal than to grab headlines from a liberal media that is losing more and more of their subscribers pushing them closer to bankruptcy because the American public is finding it harder to take anything they write serious any more.

Here's a BET for you: The courts will continue to find on behalf of this Administration that the President and his advisors have a right to keep their communications private; that no laws were broken and that Henry Waxman and the current "leadership" (oxymoron) in the House and Senate are nothing but a bunch of retarded loons who couldn't lead their way out of a wet paper sack.

What a joke. Yet here you go again with the same tired Liberal divisive political tactics.

__________________
Nothing can frighten a Socialist more than the TRUTH; and nothing can frighten Obama more than REALITY

aps

Armitage did not know? I don't buy that for a minute.

Truth Detector

What is ironic is your continual lack of facts to support your wild eyed assertions.

Clinton was caught LYING under oath about having SEX with an INTERN in the White House. That is an impeachable offense. He was also DISBARRED for the same offense.

What is fascinating is that Liberals, who attempt to argue they are more credible and interested in transparent honest Government, continue to defend such offensively poor behavior which exhibited Clinton’s profound lack of good judgment in their weak efforts to suggest that anyone has proved ANY wrong doing in this administration?

Again for all you Liberals who prefer to wallow in denial; saying it is so is not considered solid evidence of wrong doing. You still have to have FACTS; unfortunately, an entire political party in this country is attempting to lower the bar for decency and credibility for many future politicians including themselves with such empty, offensive, absurd and false political rhetoric.

section eight

As per the McCarthy article this point was raised by the press in court, but he doesn't mention the name of the case and the link to brief is broken so I don't know what the courts ruling was but here's that part of his article anyways:

section eight

Well according to the news coverage he assumed she was not covert, he was not intentionally outing a CIA agent and as per Section 421 of U.S. Code Title 50 intent is key:

According to Armitage he learned of her in a non-classified memo which is why he didn't think she was covert:

aps

Hmmmm...okay. Thanks for posting this. I'll buy he didn't know she was covert. Prior to this, while I believed that Armitage knew of her status, I didn't think he had violated the statute because he did not have the intent as described in it.

Orius

Yes, I know what happened. I am saying that it was ironic that he was faced with such a flurry of legal action stemming from an affair, when the current President has done enough questionable things to have inquiries conducted against him. Note that I say investigation and not conviction, despite your assertion that I am making claims of wrongdoing. Even the President deserves fair legal process. I believe there should at least be a bipartisan (or perhaps non-partisan?) hearing into whether or not an impeachment process has any weight to proceed.

Here are some things he could be brought up on:

1) Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush administration advocated that suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban members would be designated as "unlawful combatants". They suggested that, as such, they were not protected under the Geneva Conventions. To address the mandatory review by a "competent tribunal" as defined by article five of the Third Geneva Convention, Combatant Status Review Tribunals were established. The American Bar Association, Human Rights Watch, the Council on Foreign Relations and Joanne Mariner from FindLaw have dismissed the use of the unlawful combatant status as not compatible with U.S. and international law. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court held that Common Article 3 (CA3) of the Geneva Conventions applies to detainees in the Global War on Terrorism.

2) The CIA has "rendered" suspected terrorists, such as Maher Arar, to other countries. Critics accuse them of doing this in order to avoid U.S. laws prescribing due process and prohibiting torture, calling this "torture by proxy" and "torture flights". Then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales explicitly testified to Congress that the administration's position was to extradite detainees to other nations as long as it was not "more likely than not" that they would be tortured, although he later modified that statement. However, the Convention against torture states:

No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

3) Lewis "Scooter" Libby, convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection to the investigation of the leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, was sentenced to 30 months in prison and a fine of $250,000, which he paid with $400 in additional fees. While Libby's appeal in United States v. Libby was still pending, the presiding judge, Reggie Walton, denied his request for a stay and ordered Libby to begin his prison sentence. Following that decision, Bush commuted Libby's sentence, eliminating the prison term on the basis that the sentence was too harsh and would have lasting effects on Libby's career.

In response, representative Robert Wexler (D-FL) stated he would file a resolution censuring President George W. Bush for the "egregious and politically motivated commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence."

4) On April 6, 2006, court papers were filed in the CIA leak grand jury investigation, stating that Libby had testified that Bush authorized the disclosure of select portions of the then classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. The position of the Bush administration is that a Presidentially authorized release of material, even if it does not go through the formal declassification procedure, is not a "leak", because Presidents are authorized to de-classify material and the release of de-classified material is not leaking. This contradicts previous statements by Bush in which he made clear that leaking classified information is unacceptable. According to the court filings by Fitzgerald:

“Defendant (Libby) testified that this July 8 meeting was the only time he recalled in his government experience when he disclosed a document to a reporter that was effectively declassified by virtue of the President’s authorization that it be declassified.”

5) In March 2007 it became known that eight United States Attorneys were dismissed. The Bush administration has issued changing and contradictory statements about the timeline of the planning of the firings, persons who ordered the firings, and reasons for the firings. Congressmen investigating these dismissals stated that sworn testimony from Department of Justice officials contradicts internal Department memos and e-mails.

Because of that, and the uncommon nature of these firings, critics suggest ulterior motives. Among them, Elizabeth Holtzman and Cynthia L. Cooper wrote that: "we may be witnessing criminal acts of obstruction of justice at the highest levels of government." They allege that the attorneys were fired as retribution for prosecuting Republicans, for failing to prosecute enough Democrats, and/or for non-existent voter-fraud. This supposed fraud led The New York Times to the following response:

"Last week, we learned that the administration edited a government-ordered report on voter fraud to support its fantasy. The original version concluded that among experts "there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud." But the publicly released version said, "There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud." It's hard to see that as anything but a deliberate effort to mislead the public."

6) Bush has asserted broad executive powers, attributing them to his position as Commander-in-Chief and to the war on terrorism. These have been used to justify policies connected with the war in Iraq. Constitutional law expert Glenn Greenwald attributes Bush's interpretation of the authority of the president to a series of legal memos by John Yoo, identifies this expansive interpretation as the common thread shared by the other Bush controversies, and indicates that this interpretation is based on combining the powers of all three branches of government in the single person of the President, and is therefore the diametric opposite of the text and the Founding Fathers' intended meaning of the Constitution

section eight

It was still a stupid thing for him to have done but I don't believe it is a prosecutable offense.

Back onto the OP, according to the SCOTUS case I believe that Executive Privilege is presumed unless the prosecutor can provide a "sufficient showing" that the material or testimony is necessary for the "justice of the case", (418 U.S. at 713-14). And since (IIRC) Special Independent Prosecutor Patrick Fitizgerald has rested his case and it hasn't even been adequately shown that a crime has in fact been committed then Executive Privilege would appear to apply.

aps

I haven't studied this enough to agree with your assessment that Executive Privilege applies here. I don't think it should apply to the inquiry regarding the Justice Department.

section eight

Well according to the current precedent of the ratio decidendi found in the U.S. V. Nixon case it would apply unless the prosecutor can provide sufficient showing that these material are necessary to proving the crime.