Back at the Justice Department, there is an equally extraordinary scene. Appalled by the White House's heavy-handed attempt to coerce the gravely ill attorney general, virtually the entire top leadership of the Justice Department is threatening to resign. The group includes the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum and the chief of the Criminal Division, Chris Wray. Some of them gather in the conference room of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who describes Ashcroft's bravely turning away the president's men from his hospital bed. The mood that night in the conference room was tense—and sober. "This was a showdown," says a former senior Justice Department official who was there. "Everybody understood the choice they were making and the gravity of the situation. Everybody knew what the stakes were." A different source estimated that as many as 30 top DOJ officials would have resigned.
Comey has said that the mass exodus was averted only when he met personally and alone with President Bush, where one can assume he told the president what would happen if he tried to push the program through. It would be speculation, but I don't think misplaced or silly speculation, to think that words close to or exactly "Worse than Watergate" were spoken in that room that night.
The thing I think is important about that night is: The fact that they tried to do what they did makes them as guilty of it as if they had. You don't get a pass when you try to rob a bank and fail. Bush, Gonzales, and Card, and who knows who else, tried to go around the actual Attorney General to get the not-Attorney General to sign off on what the Attorney General and not-Attorney General had already told them was an illegal program - while the not-Attorney General was ill.
Someone tell me how that's not a "high crime."
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