Tick, Tick Tick……. Boom?

Can it be true? Is  Bush’s ‘accountability moment’ closer than we thought?

All of a sudden and without very much warning the Bush administration has been neatly checkmated by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the Scooter Libby perjury trial. All week the prosecutor has been demolishing Scooter Libby’s memory lapse defence, forcing Libby into his fallback position , that  ‘Rove did it and ran away and I’m being blamed, waaah’.

This defence means that both Rove and Cheney have now been subpoenaed to appear as witnesses, the first time they will be publicly grilled on events surrounding Plame and Bush’s war lies.

Both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney will be compelled to testify under oath about their deliberate outing of one of their own country’s secret agents, Valerie Plame. It’s alleged by the prosecution that they leaked the information just to get political revenge on her ex-husband, who had exposed the administration’s blatant lie that Saddam Hussein had attempted to obtain uranium to build  nuclear weapons. This untruth was a central component of their dishonest and illegal attempts to concoct a casus belli to justify the preemptive invasion of Iraq.

Their problem now – and it seems the White House hadn’t anticipated it, which tells you all you need to know about Harriet Miers’ tenure as WH Chief counsel – is that,  because Libby’s defence consists of the argument that Rove did it and Libby’s the scapegoat, this implies a conspiracy between the Oval office and Dick Cheney, which in turn implicates Bush. Cheney must’ve colluded with both Bush and Rove in blaming his own closest aide , and though it’s Cheney and Rove who’ll actually be on the stand being publicly interrogated, it’s a whole can of worms Bush himeslf would really rather not have opened.

And they’re just two of the witnesses likely to be called to testify. Still to come are many other WH officials and mebers of the Republican nomenklatura, all of whom have their own hides to protect. Former WH press spokesman Ari Fleischer for instance was so concerned about his own skin he refused to testify without a guarantee of immunity.

Bush must be worrying himself sick as nemesis closes in on him. No wonder he looks so dreadful, thin and old. I doubt he’s getting his 12 hour nightly sleep unassisted. Now the trial is about to reach the point where he must do something desperate, like issuing a pardon, to save himself and his closest cronies from public exposure as the criminals they are.

This coming week will see some real nail-biting stuff. Will Cheney & Rove lie under oath to save Bush’s skin, damning Libby? Will their fervid loyalty carry them through perjuring themselves? If they do, will Libby drop the whole cabal into the shit? How far will prosecutor Fitzgerald question Rove & Cheney about the rationale for the war and Bush’s role in that?

So what are Bush’s options at this dangerous stage? Of course Bush, wielding his doubtfully-acquired Presidential powers, could end all this by fiat and pardon Libby tomorrow. Murray Waas thinks this course of action is what Libby’s lawyers are signalling to the WH with their tactics so far.

But why would they do that? Although a pardon would solve a number of his problems, for Libby this would mean he’d admitted guilt. This has the potential to ruin him financially, as a presidential pardon doesn’t preclude the bringing of any civil suit that results from the crime pardoned. That really would be a desperate move.

But Bush’s dilemma is that, although a pardon may halt the prosecution and the inconvenient revelations about his lies, it will cause a political furore. But why should Bush give  a fig for that, as long as his little local difficulty is over and Cheney & Rove kept off the stand? 

It’s always been his way – get a job by nepotism or other dubious means, royally screw it up with incompetence and dishonesty, then run away leaving things in a shambles. Rely on the resulting chaos to mask culpabilty and save his ass and if that doesn’t work, crank up the Republican noise machine.

Will the same strategy work for him this time, or will the WH let the trial go ahead and Rove and Cheney lie under oath? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to see what happens.

But one other eventuality than a pardon occurs to me – over this past couple of weeks, the administration has been quietly firing politically independent US federal prosecutors (8 so far), and replacing them with loyal Republican apparatchiks.

These handpicked and underqualified party loyalists don’t require confirmation by Congress, thanks to a nifty clause slipped into a totally unrelated piece of legislation by a loyal Republican senator. How very cunning of him in the light of those attorneys being in the midst of prosecuting any number of Republican misdeeds. I doubt he thought of that on his own.

Bush may not have to pardon Libby at all, just fire Patrick Fitzgerald instead.

Personally I really, really want to see Cheney on the stand, as do lots of people. It’ll be standing room only for  Fitz v Cheney, the OK corral de nos jours, and if his recent combative appearances on television are any guide, it ‘ll be nothing if not entertaining. Personally I hope Cheney gets so apopletic that a mere lawyer dares to call him to account that he has a stroke and keels over right there in his chair. 

But will the trial even get that far? Has Bush got the gall to step in and stop it?  We’ll just have to wait and see.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall says he knows why Ari Fleischer soght immunity:

It turns out Ari Fleischer will be the next witness, once court resumes Monday. (Damn, just missed him!) The defense team wants to note—for the jury’s benefit—that Fleischer demanded immunity before he would agree to testify, because this might cast Fleischer’s testimony in a different light.

And here Fitzgerald makes a nice little chess move: Fine, he says, we can acknowledge that Fleischer sought immunity. As long as we explain why. Turns out Fleischer saw a story in the Washington Post suggesting that anyone who revealed Valerie Plame’s identity might be subject to the death penalty. And he freaked.

Heh.