Watergate Process Advances;
Get Obama Out by September!
by Nancy Spannaus
June 25—The swarm of scandals surrounding this Presidency makes it indisputable: A Watergate process is well underway. With the looming Congressional vote on contempt against Attorney General Eric Holder, the bipartisan uproar and pending investigation over Obama's national security leaks, and the judicial move to nullify part of the Administration's legislation permitting unlimited detention of American citizens (National Defense Authorization Act/NDAA), President Barack Obama is increasingly under attack from almost every side.
The smell of the Nixon Watergate precedent is permeating the process. As in the case of Nixon, it is not actually his Constitutional crimes around which a consensus is developing to get this President out of office, but the series of missteps and coverups, and general incompetence in which he has been caught. But, given the broad hatred of what this President has done, and not done, during his term in office, this is enough to provide the political basis to remove him.
Urgent as this matter is, given the killer nature of the British puppet President, who could go so far as to take us into nuclear war, it must be combined with the prospect of a viable alternative, to avoid the prospect of chaos. In a presentation June 23, Lyndon LaRouche outlined the requirements:
"Now, the alternative is, since the Republican process doesn't work—Mitt Romney is a real problematic creature and will do nothing of the type that is necessary under this condition—therefore, we need a new candidate to replace Obama, as a leading candidate. We don't want this to go on too long, because now you're going into a process on a countdown to certain steps of the proceedings leading to the choosing of the Presidential candidates, and to the decisions that have to be made going into an election.
"So therefore, we have to get essentially, a Democratic-flagged alternative to Obama. We have to have Obama out, in order to bring that forth as the new candidate. It has to be done as a cooperative operation, with a leading section of the Republican constituencies, as well as the Democratic. We've got to get a new Presidency, going in a different direction, in place more or less immediately. Immediately, in the sense of the decisions on the nomination of the alternative, the intended alternative, by agreement, to a President, who will be nominally a Democratic candidate, who will be in place, soon. So therefore, this bum has to be rushed out of office."
Nixon's Ghost
No particular event evoked the image of Obama as the embattled Nixon more clearly than President Obama's invoking of Executive privilege in the Fast and Furious case, the infamous gun-walking case which resulted in the death of at least one government agent by Mexican drug-lords using a U.S.-supplied weapon, about which Attorney General Holder has been withholding documents subpoenaed by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. This, despite the fact that the Attorney General has been forced to admit that the Justice Department lied to Congress about the gun-walking operation.
The first question to be raised in the face of Executive privilege, of course, is: What is being covered up?
About a week ago, it appeared that Holder was moving to comply with the Committee request, which had been pared down from the original version. On June 15, the Attorney General indicated his desire to work out a deal to hand over a selection of the additional documents, and staffers from the Congressional committee were dispatched to the Justice Department to try to work out the details. In pursuance of an alleged deal, Holder requested a meeting with chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who had mooted postponing the June 20 committee vote on the contempt citation in return for the documents. To Issa's apparent surprise, Holder showed up empty-handed!
Holder did make an offer, according to Issa. He said that he would provide certain documents "on the condition" that the committee would not pursue the matter further. This "offer" was declined.
So the hearing proceeded, at which point the Attorney General announced, on the basis of a letter from an Assistant AG, that President Obama had invoked Executive privilege over the documents in question. Unlike many other cases of such invocation, there was no specific itemization or grounds given for the withholding. Under these circumstances, the committee decided to consider the claim of privilege invalid, and voted the Attorney General in contempt of Congress. The question now goes to the floor of the House of Representatives, where Issa still believes it will get Democratic as well as Republican votes.
Under conditions where Holder is held in contempt, Obama's protections for his crimes are considerably weakened.
On what basis did the President declare Executive privilege? Did he do it to protect himself, or to protect his Attorney General and his staff? These questions are being raised by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who has consistently pursued this issue with the Obama Administration, as he pursued questionable practices previously with the Bush Administration. The President's action puts him directly in the center of the investigation for the first time—and like Nixon, that could be a fatal mistake.
Laughed Out of the Box
The White House press briefing of June 21 is highly indicative of the shift in mood that the President's behavior has helped to create. The White House press corps openly laughed at Press Secretary Jay Carney's statement on President Obama's assertion of Executive privilege. Here is a partial transcript:
Carney: "This is entirely about principle, it has nothing to do.... (LAUGHTER)."
The questions from the press corps clearly made Carney feel squeamish as he tried to stick to his talking points, undoubtedly scripted by Obama re-election campaign honcho David Axelrod. Here's a sample of the exchanges:
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"The documents being blocked through executive privilege, any of them to or from individuals in the White House or are they all internal DOJ documents?"
Carney: "I don't have a way to characterize the documents in question here. I can tell you that long ago the administration provided documentation about specific questions regarding officials at the White House and the national security staff...."
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"In early 2011, the Justice Department wrote a letter to Congress in which they said something that was not true.... They said that ATF had nothing to do with guns going over into Mexico. That wasn't true and it took them until December 2011 to take that back. Is there not a legitimate investigative and oversight responsiblity to find out what the Department of Justice knew when they were giving false information to Congress?"
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"The family of Brian Terry, the slain border patrol agent, at his murder scene, at least two of these guns were found, they disagree with your characterization about these investigations...."
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"Can you say categorically that there is no—there has been no cover-up?"
Carney: "Absolutely."
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"You kept saying that the Attorney General deserves credit for ending the operation. Does he not deserve some blame for the fact that this gun-running operation resulted in a federal agent being killed on his watch?"
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"You've also given the attorney general credit here for turning over, I think you at one point said every page to Congress, 7,600 pages.... I think the number is something like 70-80,000 pages. So how can you say every page has been turned over if Congress has gotten about 10 percent of it?"
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"What is covered by what the president is claiming executive privilege on beyond the broad protecting.... How broad is the scope? I mean, what does it cover?"
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"On this question of how far the privilege goes, traditionally privilege has involved with the—interactions with the White House and the White House staff or national security. In this case, it seems to go beyond that."
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"How far would the president go in standing by Eric Holder in the midst of all this?"
Carney: "I don't—I'm not sure what that means."
The 'Issues'
The Fast and Furious confrontation is only one among many that are pending between Congress, the national security apparatus, and the judiciary, against the Obama Administration. In virtually every case, what is contested is not the actually Hitlerian character of this President's policies—ranging from his Health Care act (based on the "lives not worthy to be lived" policy of the Hitler regime); to his aggressive war crime by unconstitutionally going to war against Libya; to his arrogation to himself of the power to determine the life or death of American citizens, among other police-state measures; to his criminal policy of bailout of the predator Wall Steet and British banks at the expense of the American people. Rather, it is a question of procedures and missteps, for which he is now beginning to be called on the carpet.
The same was true in the Nixon case, LaRouche recently emphasized. While leading policy circles are aware of the Constitutional, principled issues, the broader population in the political parties, Congress, and elsewhere is driven by an emotional revulsion against the President. They are tired of being used in his personal power games; they hate what he has done to the economy, or allowed to happen; they are desperately tired of these grinding wars. People just want him out of there. But the vehicle for moving to oust the bum is something else altogether.
It were better, of course, if the American people could be rallied behind the Constitutional principles at stake, including that of Glass-Steagall and national banking. Tragically, our country has undergone a process of corruption, and toleration of corruption, which has left our population ignorant of those principles, by and large, except when they overlap their direct personal interest. That process can be traced directly to our British imperial enemy, with no agent more destructive than Aaron Burr's puppet President Andrew Jackson, who destroyed the tradition of national banking on the basis of a blatant scam.
As the political leadership of a newly revived American System, the LaRouche movement is determined to educate the population again, around these principles, as well as their programmatic offshoots. But the first steps to saving the nation have to be taken now.
The Alternative
There is a minimum consensus that must be reached among patriots of both parties, in order to avoid the current disaster—both in terms of the Presidential choice, and the existential economic and strategic crises.
First, an agreement upon removing Obama from office—by threat of impeachment, as with Nixon, or application of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment; or a full revolt at the September Democratic Convention—it has to be done.
Second, there must be cooperation to prevent the process Obama has pressed, on British instigation, of provoking a confrontation with Russia and China. That kind of cooperation, featuring the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been effective since the Fall of 2011, but we are not out of the woods yet, as the drive toward a "regime change" war in Syria, directly counter to Russian and Chinese insistence, makes clear.
Impelling the British financial empire toward that confrontation is the ongoing financial-economic breakdown crisis, which puts their world dominance on the line. The first step to ending that genocidal dominance is the third element of the essential consensus—ramming through the re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall law. There is already an impressive consensus in favor of reimposing Glass-Steagall within the United States, from among widely different layers, including bankers, labor unions, and even Congress.
All these elements of the consensus underscore what we said at the beginning: American cannot face a choice of Obama or Romney in November. Obama has to be removed now, so that a viable alternative can be found to defeat a Romney—who has embraced similar disastrous policies.
