Caught in a Rove: Will Bush Fight it?

The wheels of justice grind slowly but surely in a country like the U.S., which is governed by constitutional democracy. The demigods of political power and influence are not above the law. They may have a field day abusing the power that their office confers on them but a day of reckoning is sure to arrive. In the present administration, the role of the vice president became unusually more important than in the previous administrations and the crucially important policy decisions were crafted by the vice president who recommended them to the president for implementation.

The case for going to war in Iraq was hatched in the vice president’s office where his Chief of staff I. “Scooter” Libby, Jr. collected fabricated information regarding the weapons of mass destruction (wmds) that Iraq was suggested to possess. The vice president held in disdain the report of the UN Weapons Inspectors who had gone over Iraq with a fine-toothed comb in search of the wmds and came empty-handed. They disregarded the CIA reports that there existed no link between Niger and Iraq for providing plutonium to Iraq for manufacturing the nuclear weapons.

When Joseph Wilson reported that there was no such deal after his fact-finding trip to Niger, the fury of vice president’s office turned on him with full blast. The covert status of his wife, a secret agent at the CIA, was outed to silence him and that was an act whereby the manipulators overstepped the line of the law. They believed that in the gathering storm of the rage against Iraq, nobody will pay much attention to it and Joseph Wilson will be put in the box together with his critical stance against the administration. Quite the contrary! That is where they miscalculated. The whole thing started unraveling particularly when the war in Iraq was also not going as well as they had imagined, and got out of control.

Nobody is above the law no matter how high he (she) is positioned in the echelons of power; this is a maxim which is put to test now and then. In recent history, President Nixon resigned in the face of the ongoing vote for his impeachment for cover up in the Watergate scandal. Many of his aides, high and low, went to jail for the crimes that they committed for the cover up. Nixon was saved from further embarrassment by the apology given him by his successor, President Gerald Ford. President Clinton escaped impeachment for perjury by the narrowest margin in Monica Lewinski’s sex scandal.

Although there is a lot of partisan feelings in such cases and people lose objectivity when commenting on them, such feelings are mostly confined to the public and news media spinmeisters; the judiciary is by and large not influenced by them.

What goes around does indeed come around. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Jr., the alter-ego of Vice President Dick Cheney and his Chief of Staff “was indicted Friday (October 28) on charges of obstruction of justice, making a false statement and perjury in the CIA leak case.”

“Mr. Libby’s story that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true. It was false... He was at the beginning of the chain of the phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And he lied about it afterward, under oath, repeatedly,” according to the indictment report. As was generally expected, “After the indictment was announced, Libby submitted his resignation to White House Chief of Staff Andy Card. It was accepted and Libby left the grounds. Card notified Bush….Cheney issued a statement saying he had accepted Libby’s resignation ‘with deep regret.’ He added that Libby was entitled to a presumption of innocence in the case and praised his longtime aide as ‘one of the most capable and talented individual I have ever known,’” (Yahoo!News, October 28, 2005. Libby will have his day in court to defend himself.

President Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, who testified four times in front of the grand jury and remained persistently under investigation, is off the hook for now. Investigation in his involvement will continue under a different grand jury. According to Yahoo!News, “Rove’s lawyer said he was told by special prosecutor Fitzgerald’s office that investigators would continue their probe into the aide’s conduct. The lack of an indictment against Rove was a mixed outcome for the administration. It keeps in place the president’s top advisor, the architect of his political machine whose fingerprints can be found on virtually every policy that emerges from the White House. But leaving Rove in legal jeopardy keeps Bush and his team working on problems like the Iraq war, a Supreme Court vacancy and slumping poll ratings beneath a dark cloud of uncertainty.”

“Trying to put up a brave face on one of the darkest days of his presidency, Bush traveled to Norfolk, Va., earlier in the day to deliver a speech on terrorism. ‘Thanks for the chance to get out of Washington,’ he said.”

The grand jury investigation has cast a cloud of mistrust and suspicion over the administration. The president now has the lowest ratings in his five-year stay in office. The signs of strain were first revealed by Harriet Mier’s withdrawal of her nomination to the Supreme Court.

President Bush now needs all the resources that he can muster to weather the storm which has engulfed his oresidency.