Pelosi Weighs Prosecution: ’Do We Have a Right to Ignore’ Violations of Law? Posted By Brad Friedman On 18th January 2009 @ 13:54 In Accountability,

Her words are more impressive when read, than when seen in the video [1], I think. Nonetheless, both seem to reveal a Pelosi at a bit of a crossroads. Perhaps. Could the woman who took impeachment "off the table" be ready to now move in a different direction?

In a Sunday morning interview with Fox’ Chris Wallace, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi signaled that she’s open to backing prosecutions of Bush administration officials that may arise from congressional hearings.

"I think we have to learn from the past and we cannot let the politicizing of, for example, the Justice Department to go unreviewed," said Pelosi, . "The past is prologue, we learn from it... I want to see the truth come forth."

"I think you look at each item and see what is a violation of the law and do we even have a right to ignore it," Pelosi said. "We have a contempt of Congress against members of the executive branch who withheld information from us."

The words that impress me most there: "You look at each item and see what is a violation of law and do we even have a right to ignore it."

After Declaring ’Impeachment Off the Table’, Pelosi Now Backs Bush Probes Written by Jason Leopold Sunday, 18 January 2009 13:37 By Jason Leopold

In a stunning reversal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has for the past two years has staunchly refused to back calls to impeach President George W. Bush, now says she will support congressional efforts to investigate the Bush administration over it’s controversial practices, such as the politicization of the Department of Justice.

Pelosi who famously remarked in 2006 after Democrats won control of both Houses of Congress that "impeachment is off the table" indicated during an interview with Fox News she was willing to support legislation proposed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers to create a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to probe the "broad range" of policies pursued by the Bush administration "under claims of unreviewable war powers," including torture and warrantless wiretaps.

But Pelosi did not indicate whether she would support Conyers’ efforts to investigate the Bush administration’s torture and rendition policies. Such an investigation could prove to be an embarrassment for the Speaker and other Democratic leaders who were briefed by the CIA about the harsh interrogation techniques--including waterboarding--used against detainees in the early days of the program, yet did nothing to stop it from continuing.

In her interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Pelosi spoke specifically about supporting a probe into the politicization at the Justice Department.

Still, when told by Fox News’ Chris Wallace that President-elect Barack Obama signaled his unwillingness to support efforts to investigate the Bush administration, Pelosi countered, saying, "I think that we have to learn from the past, and we cannot let the politicizing of the - for example, the Justice Department, to go unreviewed. Past is prologue. We learn from it. And my views on the subject - I don’t think that Mr. Obama and Mr. Conyers are that far apart."

Pelosi’s comments seem to suggest that Conyers staffers may have already contacted Obama’s new administration to work jointly on the investigative efforts.

People working closely with Conyers on legislation to form a panel to investigate Bush’s policies confirmed Sunday that Conyers office has contacted Obama’s transition team and discussed their intent to investigate. But the aides said Obama’s team simply "listened" to what they had to say and did not verbalize whether they supported the move.

Like Pelosi, Conyers, also refused to back his Democratic colleague, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio on his effort to impeach Bush. Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against the president last year.

in a foreword to a 487-page report entitled "Reining in the Imperial Presidency: Lessons and Recommendations Relating to the Presidency of George W. Bush", Conyers agreed that Bush’s actions rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, but he said it was politically inconvenient to get behind the measure at the time. But now that Democrats have a larger majority in both Houses and one of their own in the White House, Pelosi and Conyers have indicated their willingness to hold the Bush administration accountable.

Conyers has called for a blue-ribbon commission and independent criminal probes into the Bush administration’s policies. Conyers said the recommendations are not intended as political "payback or revenge," rather the goal is to "restore the traditional checks and balances of our constitutional system ... and to set an appropriate baseline of conduct for future administrations."

With regard to the politicization of the Justice Department, Pelosi made her strongest comments Sunday in support of continuing investigations to determine the role the White House played in the firing of nine federal prosecutors in December 2006.

"We have a contempt of Congress against members of the executive branch who withheld information from us on" the politicization of the Justice Department," Pelosi said during her Fox News interview. She said one of the 111th Congress’s first actions earlier this month was to revive subpoenas that expired during the last Congress when the President Bush asserted executive privilege to block Karl Rove, his Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers from testifying before Congress about the U.S. Attorney firings.

Last week, the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report that found a former top official in the agency’s civil rights division lied to a Senate committee and broke federal laws by using a political litmus test to hire and fire employees--a violation of the very laws he was charged with upholding.

Pelosi said issues related to the politicization of the Justice Department will require Congress to "look at each item and see what is a violation of the law, and do we even have a right to ignore it, and other things that are - maybe time spent better looking to the future rather than to the past."

Progressive activists have a certain amount of distrust for Pelosi, who has yet to make good on promises she made before the November 2006 midterm elections, such as ending the war in Iraq and reining in the Bush administration’s power grab.

Instead, under Pelosi’s leadership, Democrats handed the Bush administration sweeping new domestic spying powers (including immunization of telecom companies that participated in possibly illegal surveillance of American citizens) and agreed to further fund the occupation of Iraq with through a series of emergency spending bills that did not include benchmarks or timetables for withdrawal.

As congressional investigations turned up evidence that the Bush administration knowingly manipulated prewar Iraq intelligence, Pelosi found herself under scrutiny from her supporters for refusing to do anything to hold the Bush administration accountable.

Pelosi’s strained relationship with her Democratic base reached a boiling point last summer when the Speaker, who spoke at the University of Judaism in West Los Angeles, clashed with audience members about her reasons for not supporting efforts to hold impeachment hearings against Bush.

Pelosi said the Democrats’ razor-thin margin made it difficult to get their policy initiatives passed and she did not want to jeopardize Obama’s chances of winning the presidential election or risk losing a majority of the House and Senate by supporting impeachment.

Her response led Peter Thottam, founder of the LA Impeachment Center, to demand Pelosi do her job and pursue impeachment hearings against Bush for launching a war on false pretenses.

"Who gave you the right to take the constitution and shove it down the toilet? Who gave you the right to take impeachment off the table? Nobody told them to do this," Thottam shouted at Pelosi. "One million Iraqis are dead. Five thousand Americans are dead. You have destroyed the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments."

Pelosi’s about face comes as Democrats are under increasing pressure by their constituents to support efforts to launch a criminal investigation into the Bush administration’s interrogation practices. The pressure increased after retired Judge Susan J. Crawford, the head of military commissions at the Guantanamo Bay detention center told the Washington Post that she would not permit an alleged high-level al-Qaeda detainee to be prosecuted because the evidence against him was obtained through torture.

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Crawford, who was appointed convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Additionally, statements made by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney during media interviews in which they both told reporters they personally authorized interrogators to waterboard three prisoners at Guantanamo have led legal experts to conclude that the president and vice president committed war crimes. Waterboarding has been regarded as torture since the Spanish Inquisition.

Last week, Attorney General designee Eric Holder said during his Senate confirmation hearing that "waterboarding is torture." That Holder defined waterboarding in legal terms has caused a significant amount of concern for Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Mukasey told the Wall Street Journal in an interview Friday that now that the word "torture" has been used as a way to describe some interrogations he is worried that government lawyers and others who assisted the Bush administration in crafting those policies are at risk of criminal prosecution.

"Torture is a crime," Mukasey told the Journal, adding that he worried "about the effect on...the work of fine intelligence lawyers who are called on to make judgments on questions like that, often under tremendous time pressure -- not to mention the pressure of an attack that killed 3000 people [and caused worry that] maybe there was going to be another one."

Last month, Mukasey argued that there is no legal basis to prosecute current and former administration officials for authorizing torture and warrantless domestic surveillance because those decisions were made in the context of a presidential interest in protecting national security.

"There is absolutely no evidence that anybody who rendered a legal opinion, either with respect to surveillance or with respect to interrogation policies, did so for any reason other than to protect the security in the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful," Mukasey said during a Dec. 3 roundtable discussion with reporters.

Unlike his successor, Mukasey refused to say whether waterboarding was torture during his confirmation hearing in 2007.

Mukasey told the Journal that he would not answer the question because it would expose CIA agents and lawyers to who acted in good faith after 9/11 to gather intelligence.

"It’s one thing to write opinion on matter of abstruse law. It’s quite something else to write [opinions] on whether something is or isn’t a crime," Mukasey said. He added that in the future, government lawyers and agents "have to be concerned that you may someday -- having given your best, most honest, most impartial advice -- have it be said of you that you sanctioned a crime."