But the good little authoritarians who always reflexively embrace every unchecked pronouncement by the Bush administration as though it is the Gospel Truth — the attribute which is, at its core, the defining one of a mindless authoritarian — are (consistent with that mindset) now running around shrilly insisting that the Leader did no real wrong, because the DOJ Report said that nothing was really done with malicious intent here. The DOJ has spoken, and that settles that. With this mentality, these reflexive Bush defenders are exhibiting precisely the profound character flaw that has led to all of these abuses in the first place: namely, blind, gullible, cult-like and distinctly un-American trust in the assurances of the Leader without any demands of scrutiny, accountability, corroboration or oversight.

As is so often the case, Arlen Specter enables excellent insight into how this mindset functions. With these revelations of the FBI’s lawbreaking yesterday, Specter was strutting around making all sorts of dramatic protest noises, acting as though he is some sort of guardian of checks and balances and civil liberties. In fact, as Judiciary Committee Chairman from 2002 until 2006, Specter eagerly enabled a virtually complete dismantling of the system of checks and balances on presidential power, and did so by blindly and timidly relying upon administration assurances that they were acting properly.

The same Specter who now professes such grave concern over the abuse of the NSLs is the very same one who led the fight on behalf of the administration to re-authorize the Patriot Act by stampeding over concerns about, among other things, the potential for abuse of NSLs. On December 12, 2005, Specter wrote this letter (.pdf) to six Senators (including 3 Republicans) who were resisting renewal of the Patriot Act due to concerns about the potential for abuse by the Bush administration of NSLs.

Specter’s letter — written after publication of Barton Gellman’s documented expose of NSL abuses in The Washington Post — emphatically assured those worried Senators that there was absolutely nothing to worry about, because the administration secretly assured the Intelligence Committee that everything was being handled properly, and that settles that:

Specter’s letter insisting that there were few if any “problems” was written at exactly the time when the FBI was in total disarray and was issuing NSLs left and right in systematic violation of the law. But this is how our government has been run for the last six years. The Bush administration acts in total secrecy. It insists upon the power to engage in any conduct it wants.

In those isolated cases where we learn about what the administration has been doing in secret, or where Congress pretends to demand information, the administration refuses to provide any actual information (see, e.g., the NSA scandal ). Instead, they simply issue boilerplate assurances that the law is being complied with, that the powers are being exercised responsibly and properly, that there is no abuse, and that they have created ample “safeguards” (always within the Executive Branch) to ensure that no abuse occurs. Whatever isolated instances of abuse or impropriety end up being leaked are dismissed away as pure aberrations, the work of bad apples, and they profess how gravely concerned they are about such abuses and assure us that they are working diligently to ensure they never occur again.

And that is always the end of the story. No claims by the Bush administration have been meaningfully investigated because the authoritarian sickness that has governed our country has meant that there is blind faith in the representations made by the President, with no corroboration or investigation needed.

In the case of the NSLs, for instance, the DOJ — after the Post article on NSLs was published — repeatedly insisted to Congress when it was debating re-authorization of the Patriot Act in November, 2005, that the claims in the Post story were false. As but one example, the DOJ sent a letter, from Assistant Attorney General William Moschella to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Sensenbrenner, accusing the Post of presenting a “materially misleading portrayal” of the FBI’s use of national security letters (I am attempting to find that original Moschella letter; if you find it online, please leave the link in comments or by e-mail).

Obviously (as even the DOJ is now being forced to acknowledge), the attacks on the Post article by the DOJ were simply false. If anything, the Post article under-stated the problems with the NSLs. The DOJ simply gave false assurances to Congress that there were no problems with the FBI’s use of NSLs and assured Congress that all regulations and laws were being complied with. Those claims were lies, designed to steamroll over concerns about the NSLs and induce the Congress to re-authorize the Patriot Act, which it did. As the Post reports this morning:

The findings by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine were so at odds with previous assertions by the Bush administration that Capitol Hill was peppered yesterday with retraction letters from the Justice Department attempting to correct statements in earlier testimony and briefings. Gonzales and other officials had repeatedly portrayed national security letters as a well-regulated tool necessary for the prevention of terrorist attacks.

One such retraction letter, sent to Specter by Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard A. Hertling, sought to correct a 2005 letter that attacked a Washington Post story about national security letters. “We have determined that certain statements in our November 23 letter need clarification,” Hertling wrote.

How can this be tolerated or excused? This is outright lying at the highest levels of the DOJ about one of the most critical matters debated in Congress over the last six years — namely, whether to re-authorize broad investigative powers used to spy on American citizens, powers which were first vested, with virtually no debate, in the hysteria-filled environment immediately following the 9/11 attacks.

But this is what has been going since 9/11. It is the norm. It is the standard operating procedure for how our country has been governed. And there are no consequences — none — for the series of blatantly and deliberately false statements made about the most vital public matters by the highest levels of the Bush administration.

To this day, we have no idea how the administration used its illegal warrantless eavesdroppoing powers to spy on the conversations of Americans for five years, in total secrecy, because there does not seem to be much of a desire to know. After all, they have assured us that they were using these secret eavesdroppoing powers only against Terrorists and only to protect us, that they created all kinds of great and elaborate safeguards to protect us, and that we have nothing to worry about.

That mentality was captured perfectly by former NSA Director and current Director of the CIA Gen. Michael Hayden, when asked in January, 2006 how American can trust that the eavesdropping powers were not being abused given that they were exercising them in secret and with no oversight. Hayden’s response: We should just trust them, because they are Good:

I’m disappointed I guess that perhaps the default response for some is to assume the worst. I’m trying to communicate to you that the people who are doing this, okay, go shopping in Glen Burnie and their kids play soccer in Laurel, and they know the law. They know American privacy better than the average American, and they’re dedicated to it. So I guess the message I’d ask you to take back to your communities is the same one I take back to mine. This is focused. It’s targeted. It’s very carefully done. You shouldn’t worry.

That is good enough for the authoritarian mind, by definition; but it is woefully, self-evidently inadequate — outrageously so — for the American mind.

Our whole system of government, from the very beginning, has been predicated centrally on one fairly simple, clear, and easy-to-digest concept: we do not trust government leaders to exercise power in secret and without external oversight. That is because history shows that political leaders who exercise power in that unchecked and unaccountable manner are likely to abuse it.

Placing blind faith in the assurances of our political leaders is the precise antithesis of the ethos on which our system of government was founded. Why is that principle even controversial? Since when did we become a country filled with “journalists” and others who are content with allowing political officials to wield unchecked power and who are eager to place blind trust in their Goodness?

UPDATE: In the 2005 TPM post of Sen. Feingold’s to which I linked yesterday — in which he argued against re-authorization of the Patriot Act and specifically warned of the dangers of NSL abuses — Feingold explicitly cited the November 23 DOJ/Moschella letter (which is here – .pdf) that accused the Post of materially misrepresenting the FBI’s use of NSLs, along with a lengthy and well-documented reply from the Post (h/t sysprog). Taken together, as Feingold said at time, one can easily see “all the inconsistencies and misleading statements in the DOJ letter.”

This is the key point. Prior to re-authorization of the Patriot Act, there were multiple concerns being raised — by a handful of Senators and The Washington Post — over the FBI’s abuse of NSLs. But those concerns were brushed aside by false assurances from the Justice Department that the Post‘s claims were false. We know now, of course, that it was the DOJ’s claims which were false – and they have now begun retracting some of those claims now that the real behavior of the FBI is being revealed — but they succeeded in swindling the Congress into re-authorizing the Patriot Act and continuing to vest drastically expanded NSL powers in the FBI.

That the FBI is abusing its NSL power is entirely unsurprising (more on that below), but the real story here — and it is quite significant — has not even been mentioned by any of these news reports. The only person (that I’ve seen) to have noted the most significant aspect of these revelations is Silent Patriot at Crooks & Liars, who very astutely recalls that the NSL reporting requirements imposed by Congress were precisely the provisions which President Bush expressly proclaimed he could ignore when he issued a “signing statement” as part of the enactment of the Patriot Act’s renewal into law. Put another way, the law which the FBI has now been found to be violating is the very law which George Bush publicly declared he has the power to ignore.

It was The Boston Globe‘s Charlie Savage who first drew attention to the Patriot Act signing statement in a typically superb article, back in March, 2006, which reported:

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act’s expanded police powers.

The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.

Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ”a piece of legislation that’s vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people.” But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ”signing statement,” an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.

In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law’s requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ”impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive’s constitutional duties.”

Bush wrote: ”The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . ”

The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which Bush has cited his constitutional authority to bypass a law.

When a country is ruled by an individual who repeatedly and openly arrogates unto himself the power to violate the law, and specifically proclaims that he is under no obligation to account to Congress or anyone else concerning the exercise of radical new surveillance powers such as NSLs, it should come as absolutely no surprise that agencies under his control freely break the law. The culture of lawlessness which the President has deliberately and continuously embraced virtually ensures, by design, that any Congressional limits on the use of executive power will be violated.

That NSLs are a dangerous and oversight-less instrument which entail enormous potential for abuse is hardly a new revelation. But those who tried to warn of such dangers were tarred and feathered as allies of the Terrorists, people who wanted to prevent the Commander-in-Chief from protecting the American people. Who else would possibly express concerns about The Patriot Act?

As a result of that commonplace, debate-precluding cartoon campaign, Russ Feingold — the only Senator to vote against the original enactment of the Patriot Act — was able to convince only nine of his fellow Democratic Senators to oppose re-authorization of the Patriot Act. And though the media aided the White House in obscuring the substantive objections he raised to that bill, Feingold repeatedly emphasized that he was in favor of many of the provisions of the Patriot Act, but was concerned about the lack of safeguards to protect Americans from abuse — specifically the standard-less and oversight-less NSLs (as he said then: “we need to place safeguards on the broad NSL power and to put a sunset on that power so that Congress can make sure it’s not abused”). But as usual, such concerns were drowned out by manipulative appeals to the need of the Commander-in-Chief to Protect Us from The Terrorists.

Back in November, 2005, when the re-authorization of the Patriot Act was being “debated,” the abuse by the FBI of these NSLs was documented in an excellent expose by The Washington Post‘s Barton Gellman:

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans. . . . .

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.

In the same Post article, the genuine threat posed by this invasive instrument was made clear by Bob Barr:

“The beef with the NSLs is that they don’t have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny,” said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. “There’s no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat’s decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it.”

One of the very few attempts over the last six years from Congress to impose at least some safeguards on the use of radical new executive powers was to require that the FBI report to Congress on the issuance of NSLs, so that Congress could at least know about (and, theoretically, take action in response to) any abuse of these powers. But the minute George Bush got what he wanted — re-authorization of the Patriot Act — he proclaimed for all the world to hear that he had the power to violate those provisions and refuse to comply with such safeguards. And now it is revealed that the FBI has, in fact, violated the very provisions which the President proclaimed he could violate. Perhaps someone other than Silent Patriot might want to take note of that connection.

The Bush administration has created vast and permanent data bases to collect and store evidence revealing the private activities of millions of American citizens. When the FBI obtains information essentially in secret — with no judicial oversight — that information is stored in those data bases. This is all being done by the executive branch with no safeguards and no oversight, and the little oversight that Congress has required has been defiantly and publicly brushed aside by the President, who sees legal requirements as nothing more than suggestions or options which he will recognize only if he chooses to. That is the constitutional crisis that we have endured under virtually the entire Bush presidency — the crisis which, for the most part, our mainstream political and media elite have collectively decided not to acknowledge.

The story here is not merely that the FBI is breaking the law and abusing these powers. That has long been predicted and, to some degree, even documented. The story is that the FBI is ignoring the very legal obligations which George Bush vowed were not obligations at all, but mere suggestions to be accepted only if he willed it. It is yet another vivid example proving that the President’s ideology of lawlessness exists not merely in theory, but as the governing doctrine under which the executive branch has acted, time and again and as deliberately as possible, in violation of whatever laws it deems inconvenient.

UPDATE: Russ Feingold issued the following statement this morning regarding these revelations (via e-mail):

This report proves that “trust us” doesn’t cut it when it comes to the government’s power to obtain Americans’ sensitive business records without a court order and without any suspicion that they are tied to terrorism or espionage. I fought hard to prevent abuses of this power when the Senate debated reauthorizing the Patriot Act last year. I will work with Senator Leahy and Senator Rockefeller to make sure the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees conduct full and prompt investigations, and I will press for quick Senate action on sensible reforms to help prevent future abuses of National Security Letters.

One of the principal reasons why Sen. Feingold’s warnings about the obvious dangers of re-authorization were so easily ignored was the media’s tolerance for Op-Eds like this one — published by The Washington Post in November, 2005 — from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Needless to say, the first sentence of his argument urging re-authorization of the Patriot Act was this: “On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists inspired by hatred murdered nearly 3,000 innocent Americans.”

Gonzales went on to brand as “unfounded” concerns over abuse of the powers granted by the Patriot Act, and said that this was the choice the country faced: “Congress must act now or risk bringing terrorism prevention to a halt. . . . Congress must act immediately and reauthorize the Patriot Act before the men and women in law enforcement lose the tools they need to keep us safe.”

As always, the Bush administration presented a choice: (a) succumb to the Leader’s will by vesting in him the unchecked powers that he demands, or (b) help The Terrorists attack and kill innocent Americans. That binary, exploitive formula was promoted by the media and it single-handedly prevented rational examination of any of these vital issues over the last six years. The FBI’s illegal and abusive conduct is the direct by-product of that manipulation, and it is but a tiny fraction of the systematic law-breaking we have endured since 2001 at the highest levels of our government.

UPDATE II: The full report by the DOJ’s Inspector General can be found, in .pdf form, here (h/t sysprog). This report was required by Congress when it re-authorized the Patriot Act, and it covers the FBI’s use of NSLs for the period of 2003-2005; the second report, covering 2006, is due at the end of the year.

The report characterized the FBI’s conduct as constituting “serious misuse” of the NSL powers, and it is suffuse with findings of the FBI’s irregularities and improprieties. Several noteworthy aspects of the report, beginning with an illustrative passage of the report’s findings:

And what is done with the information obtained by the FBI? It is stored on government data bases which thousands of government employees can access:

More disturbingly, NSLs are being issued with much greater frequency to obtain the records of “U.S. persons” (citizens and legal residents) rather than aliens:

And while the report concluded that it could not find that these violations were deliberate (hardly a dispositive finding coming, as it does, from the Bush Justice Department), the report emphasized that its investigation into the existence of criminality was itself often hampered by the FBI’s failure to maintain proper records concerning its use of NSLs:

The report indicates that there is no consistency, virtually no controls, and continuous violations of legal and regulatory guidelines for how the FBI is using these extremely invasive NSL weapons. The information that the FBI is gathering on Americans simply gets deposited into widely accessed and permanent data bases.

And this report, as indicated, is from the Bush Justice Department. But this is the country we have created for ourselves by allowing the President to insist upon not only more and more invasive powers, but the ability to exercise those powers in virtual secrecy and with no limits. And the few limits which Congress has imposed are simply ignored because the administration knows that — at least thus far — there have been no consequences, and little public outcry, prompted by its law-breaking.

The information being gathered and stored on the private lives of American citizens by the federal government is vast and growing — and that is the conclusion compelled by what we know about what this government has been doing. This is an administration that has operated behind an unprecedented veil of secrecy, and it is undoubtedly the case that there are whole surveillance programs about which we have not learned. Do Americans really want the federal government compiling electronic dossiers on them with virtually no safeguards and no oversight?

UPDATE III: This Daily Kos diarist makes the fair point that it is not technically accurate to say that Congress required the FBI itself to report to Congress on its NSL activities. Instead, Congress required that the Justice Department file the report which was disclosed today, the purpose of which is to report to Congress on the FBI’s NSL activities. That point is true as far as it goes, but the fact remains that there is a clear connection between, on the one hand, the FBI’s failure to comply with the legal restrictions governing NSLs and its accompanying documentation requirements, and on the other, President Bush’s proclamation that those requirements can be ignored.

In other words, the Inspector General technically complied with the Congressional requirement by filing this report, but the report itself was woefully incomplete as a result of the FBI’s failure to document its activities as it was required to do. And where the report was able to reach definitive conclusions despite the FBI’s record-keeping failures, it concluded that the FBI has been repeatedly violating legal requirements governing NSLs in numerous ways.

UPDATE IV: Further developments on this matter are discussed here.

If Judge Diggs Taylor’s decision is to be reversed by the Sixth Circuit (where the appeal is pending), it is (in my view) highly likely that it will be on the standing issue. Though it may sound petty, and though it presents an outrageous Catch-22 (since Bush officials here have broken the law in secret and are now trying to benefit from that secrecy by arguing that nobody can sue them because nobody can prove they were actually injured), “standing” is an important concept because it serves to limit the jurisdiction of courts.

The Founders did not want courts to be able to run around as some floating, superior body resolving every dispute. That is why Article III limits the jurisdiction of courts to actual “Cases” or “Controversies.” They are empowered not to adjudicate any matter that is in dispute, but instead only those cases where one party is injured by the actions of another (hence, the general requirement that a plaintiff prove he has suffered specific/unique injury from a government act in order to have “standing” to challenge the legality of that act).

But as Singel documents, there is a lawsuit — brought by lawyers representing a Saudi charity under investigation for terrorist ties — in which the plaintiffs can prove that they were subjecft to surveillance, because the Bush administration inadvertently turned over the “top secret” documents which reflected that fact. I wrote about this case previously here.

Singel’s analysis as to why this case presents a genuine threat to the administration is superb. And on his blog, Singel provides links to some of the key documents in that lawsuit. The President and multiple Bush officials unquestionably violated the criminal law by eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by FISA, and it is vital to ensure accountability for that criminal conduct.

(2) In a separate post, Singel discusses the matter of the former AT&T official who claims he has knowledge of ATT’s efforts to monitor the Interact activities of Americans in collaboration with the Bush administration. As Singel notes, the editors of the LA Times killed the story at the behest of the administration.

(3) Whatever else you might think of him, John Stossel has an excellent article in Real Clear Politics this morning, entitled Fear of Terrorism Overblown?, in which he notes that various political movements, the “terrorism industry,” and the media all work in confederation, with some shared motives and some disparate ones, to greatly exaggerate Americans’ fears of terrorism beyond what is remotely justified by reason. That is not news to many people, but it is always encouraging when the exploitation of the terrorist threat — one of the principal weapons used by those who have sought to radically alter our country — is discussed in mainstream venues.

(4) The New York Sun, which is essentially the house newspaper for American neoconservatism, has an article today entitled AIPAC Will Press for Hard Line on Iran Regime. To many people, that story is the equivalent of “The Sun Will Rise Tomorrow” — something obvious, natural and expected — but there are still large segments of the political landscape which want to vehemently deny any such connection between AIPAC and other right-wing Jewish groups on the one hand, and the pressure being applied on American politicians in both parties on the other to take a hard-line against Iran.

And along those lines, Eric Alterman, who has been writing about these issues long before most people were willing to do so, a few weeks ago posted an excellent discussion of AIPAC, its attempts to influence U.S. foreign policy, and the various controversies always provoked whenever anyone even gets near this discussion.

(5) At his Talking Points Memo post, The Horse’s Mouth, Greg Sargent documents how the “fake Hillary Drawl” story went from The Drudge Report straight to CNN, and how the “reporting” at CNN was not just utterly slothful, but relied upon Drudge’s distortive work almost completely.

What Sargent did here is called “reporting.” Whatever one wants to call what CNN does when it engages in this behavior, it is something else entirely. One of the most significant, revealing and (therefore) under-discussed confessions of the last several years is the following passage in the book by ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin and former Washington Post National Editor John Harris:

Matt Drudge is the gatekeeper… he is the Walter Cronkite of his era.

In the fragmented, remote-control, click-on-this, did you hear? political media world in which we live, revered Uncle Walter has been replaced by odd nephew Matt. . . .

Matt Drudge rules our world . . . With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts.

So many media elites check the Drudge Report consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too.

As documented here many times, so many of these national journalists are unbelievably arrogant about what they think is the lofty and elevated status of their profession. It is unfathomable that they can continue to believe that in light of what two of their most influential and well-connected figures acknowledge is the dynamic that drives what so many of them actually do.

(6) This post from HTML Mencken should put an end to the brewing notion that any substantial part of the right-wing movement, let alone its leadership, has shunned Ann Coulter in light of her remarks this week.

The implications of this trial are likely to be far-reaching and long-lasting. There were few officials with greater influence or power during the first four years of the Bush administration than Libby. He was not only the vice president’s chief of staff, but also assistant to the president himself in national security matters. But Libby’s importance in the Bush administration is reflected by far more than his formal titles.

He has long been one of the most well-connected neoconservatives in the country. Along with Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and Norman Podhoretz, Libby was one of the 25 signatories to the founding statement of Bill Kristol’s empire-embracing Project for a New American Century in 1997. PNAC called for an invasion of Iraq long before the 9/11 attack was seized on as the “justification” for that invasion. When it comes to the political movement that has dominated the American government for the last six years, Scooter Libby was at its very crux, a close intimate of America’s most powerful political officials.

Today’s event sends a potent and unmistakable message, one that is absolutely reverberating in the West Wing: If Libby can be convicted of multiple felonies, then any Bush official who has committed crimes can be as well. Not only are Bush officials subject to the rule of law (their radical theories of executive power to the contrary notwithstanding), they are also vulnerable to legal consequences (the defeatist beliefs of some Bush critics notwithstanding). Having the nation watch this powerful Bush official be declared a criminal — despite having been defended by the best legal team money can buy — resoundingly reaffirms the principle that our highest political officials can and must be held accountable when they break the law.

Some of the future events in the Libby case are easy to foresee, while others are more uncertain. Almost immediately after the verdict was announced, Libby’s counsel, Theodore Wells, vowed that Libby would request a new trial and if that is unsuccessful (as it likely will be), he will appeal the conviction. Those are routine steps in a case of this magnitude. What is both less routine and less certain is the question of whether prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is planning to leverage this conviction in order to secure additional indictments against other possible defendants, possibly the vice president himself. Fitzgerald stressed after the verdict that he had “no expectations” of further indictments, but he left open that possibility in the event that new information came to light that warranted further proceedings.

The Bush administration has no good options for how to respond to this conviction politically. The seriousness of the charges is manifest. Libby was accused, and now found guilty of, obstructing justice in connection with an FBI investigation into the disclosure of a covert CIA operative. Unlike, say, defenders of Bill Clinton during his perjury impeachment trial in the Senate, the administration cannot plausibly make the claim — though its proxies in the conservative blogosphere continue to do so — that the underlying investigation that Libby obstructed was not serious. And the endless parade of emphatic speeches delivered by top Republicans about the Seriousness of Perjury during the Clinton impeachment proceedings somewhat hamstrings the ability of Republicans to be dismissive of the importance of these crimes.

Nor are potential Libby defenders able to depict Fitzgerald as some sort of partisan, out-of-control Ken Starr figure. Fitzgerald was appointed as special counsel by the Bush Justice Department, and has no Starr-like history of partisan affiliations one way or the other. By refusing to indict Karl Rove and other Bush officials who were almost certainly indictable — a decision that disappointed most Bush critics following this case — Fitzgerald has revealed himself to be a model of prosecutorial restraint. He is also now a vindicated prosecutor.

While Libby associates will undoubtedly unleash all sorts of smears on Fitzgerald in order to discredit the conviction, there are simply no effective weapons against what ought to be the serious political damage resulting from this trial. Whatever one wants to say about Fitzgerald, the jury, after lengthy deliberations, has spoken.

It is worth noting, perhaps most important, that there is a whole array of other pending judicial matters that, either directly or implicitly, entail accusations against high Bush officials, including the president himself, of engaging in serious criminal behavior. Last August, a federal district judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, ruled that President Bush‘s warrantless eavesdropping program violated not only the Constitution but also FISA, a criminal statute making it a federal felony to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial warrants and imposing punishments of five years’ imprisonment for each offense and fines up to $10,000.

Also last fall, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Hamdan case rejected the Bush administration’s principal defense for its violations of the Geneva Conventions not only with regard to military commissions, but also generally. By holding that Common Article 3 of the Conventions applies to all detainees, and by emphasizing that a failure to treat detainees in compliance with Common Article 3 constitutes “war crimes,” the Supreme Court effectively found that Bush officials have authorized and engaged in what clearly could be construed to be felony violations of the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. sec. 2241), which makes it a federal crime to violate war treaties such as the Geneva Conventions. Though the administration succeeded in inducing the Republican-led Congress to enact the Military Commissions Act as a shield against retroactive criminal liability, the constitutionality of that law, and the efficacy of the criminal shield provisions, are far from certain.

Beyond these known areas of potential criminal liability, the control of Congress that Democrats have now been given enables them to conduct probing investigations in order to finally penetrate the unprecedented wall of secrecy behind which the Bush administration has operated. Meaningful investigations will almost certainly generate additional sources of potential criminality on the part of this government.

There have been times in American history when it appeared as though certain political leaders were too powerful to be held legally accountable for their actions. Yet the rule of law in this country — as slow, imperfect and endangered as it sometimes may be — typically prevails over a particular elected official or political movement. Richard Nixon was reelected in 1972 with the largest landslide in American history, but he spent the next two years watching as his closest aides were hauled off to criminal proceedings and convicted, and in 1974, Nixon himself was forced from office, dependent upon Gerald Ford’s pardon in order to avoid being imprisoned himself.

This administration has concocted all sorts of radical theories to justify its transgressions and outright violations of the law. It began that behavior at a time when it appeared that it was invulnerable and too politically powerful to be held accountable. After today’s conviction of one of its own, it most assuredly sees things differently.