Hail to the Thief!

Wednesday, 21 December 2005

After looking up the criminal penalties for Bush's illegal wiretaps, I got to thinking. There are only two ways to go after a sitting President for a criminal offense:

• Impeachment. That's a problem because the Republicans control both houses of Congress.
• Appoint a Special Counsel, convene a Grand Jury, indict everyone involved, name the President as an unindicted co-conspirator, and hope he resigns in shame. That's a problem too, because it's the Attorney General who appoints the Special Counsel, and he's also the first one who would get indicted. Plus this President has no shame.

So, is there another way? Turns out FISA has a civil liability section. You can sue for $1000 or $100/day, which could get interesting if there are, as I suspect, millions of incidents. You can also get punitive damages and attorney's fees.

Class action lawsuit, anyone?