Cheating Justice by Elizabeth Holtzman Page B

came to the conclusion that impeachment was necessary. The vote reached across party lines, and the country accepted the verdict.
    All these years later, I still remember that it was hard to vote for President Nixon’s impeachment, even though I was no fan of his policies and particularly disagreed with his pursuit of war in Vietnam. While few were eager to find our president engaged in criminality, it strengthened the country to know that, in the end, most Americans valued the rule of law more than the fate of any one person. The process in Watergate had worked well to protect the nation from a criminal president.
    The Nixon impeachment process, because it was done so fairly, has withstood the test of time, and remains a high-water mark in the nation’s efforts to make sure its officials respect the law.
    I also believed that more than enough evidence existed to conclude that President Bush and Vice President Cheney had violated their oaths of office and committed “high crimes and misdemeanors”—and in ways especially damaging to our democracy. 6 But unlike Nixon, President Bush and VicePresident Cheney did not face impeachment proceedings, nor did any significant legal review of their actions take place.
    In contrast to the situation with President Nixon, there has been no official reckoning of the actions of President Bush. A grand jury named President Nixon an unindicted co-conspirator. A House Judiciary Committee impeachment report set forth his “high crimes and misdemeanors.” An official record was made of his misconduct, so that history could not mistake it and it could not be whitewashed with propaganda, memoirs, or an attempt to rewrite the facts.
    Even without a Bush-Cheney impeachment, I knew that accountability could come after they left office. That was another lesson from Watergate. President Gerald Ford, who took office when Nixon resigned, recognized that a former president could be prosecuted for his crimes in office. President Ford took the extraordinary step of issuing a pardon to former president Nixon, insisting that he had “suffered enough” by having to resign in order to avoid impeachment. President Ford’s pardon of Nixon to prevent a possible prosecution was roundly denounced at the time because it created a dual sense of justice. The American people did not want one set of criminal standards for a president and another for the rest of us. This may well have been the most important factor in Ford’s defeat in the next election.
    When I started thinking about paths to accountability for the criminal misdeeds of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, I intended to make the case for prosecution. Based on what I already knew and had researched and written about, I expected to find a range of illegality—and I did. What I hadn’t expected to find were the mounting pieces of information and evidence that showed a pattern and practice by which President Bush and Vice President Cheney, after undertaking illegal actions and keeping them secret, went on to set up fake justifications for their behavior, blamed others, inserted hidden defenses in the law, and schemed to protect themselves from the consequences of their criminal conduct by every means possible. As I examined the facts more closely, I saw that they had even succeeded in changing laws in an attempt—possibly successful—to exonerate themselves.
    This could happen only in a country still traumatized by the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and willing to believe a president, no matter what. Taking advantage of this post-9/11 atmosphere, President Bush conducted illegal wiretapping, lied about it, and when exposed, assertedthat he could flout the law. Surveillance of Americans—secret and unnoticed—can do permanent damage by chilling diversity and depth of opinion and speech. President Bush, no doubt, knew how sensitive Americans are to invasions of their privacy.