Rep. Nadler said Pres, VP, AG in criminal conspiracy

Representative John Conyers held a hearing today which was televised on C-SPAN. I just watched most of the rebroadcast of it on TV.

I do not have a source to go to at the moment to get the exact purpose of this hearing or a transcript of it. I'll explain my problems with the CSPAN video further down this post. I'll try to recap the sense of the meeting from memory.

I believe the meeting consisted of the testimony of six people, five of them lawyers or professors of law, and one an anti-war activist whose group has been spied on consistently who were invited to comment and submit briefs on the constitutiionality of domestic surveillance without FISA warrants. In addition, several representatives who attended the hearing also spoke.

One presenter and one congressman made points which I found absolutely stunning.

Professor Jonathan Turley from George Washington School of Law stated unequivocally that the President had broken the law, had committed an impeachable offence, and that it was the duty of congress to hold hearings with supoena power.

As for Congressman Jerrold Nadler, I was able to get an exact quote from the one, single article on google that mentions this statement by Congressman Nadler.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said he agrees a special counsel is needed.

"If you're dealing with what appears to be a criminal conspiracy by the president, the vice president, the attorney general and others, you cannot ask the attorney general and the people under him to fairly investigate," Nadler said. "Obviously, they will dismiss this out of hand because they will not admit how real this is."

I looked at the New York Times article  on this same hearing. It is interesting that the writer, Erich Lichtblau, did not mention Jerrold Nadler's statement above but did focus on Nadler's mention of Hitler at a certain point.

"Meanwhile, House Democrats, frustrated that Republican leaders had refused to hold hearings on the matter, held an unusual unofficial hearing of their own on Friday.

The eight Democratic lawmakers at the event were unrelenting in their criticism of a program that they said would open the way to unlimited presidential powers. Some questioned whether Mr. Bush's authorization of it was an impeachable offense.

Several lawmakers and witnesses compared the administration to a British monarchy, casting Mr. Bush as George III. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, even compared the president's powers to those the Nazis used early to cement their power.

Mr. Nadler said that as he read the broad presidential power claimed by Mr. Bush, "if he were in Germany in 1933, he would not have required the Enabling Act to pass the Reichstag to claim the power," a reference to the law that gave Hitler broad power to run the country.

When asked about the remark, Mr. Nadler's spokesman, Reid Cherlin, said: "He's not comparing Bush to Hitler. He's saying that Nazi Germany is our most extreme example of the rapid expansion of executive power and even there, there was legislative approval of an emergency package."

In a later statement, Mr. Cherlin said Mr. Nadler had "picked an example that he shouldn't have" in illustrating his point.

The Washington Post's coverage of the Democratic hearing was as follows (unless there is something I didn't find):

Rep. John Conyers, the House Judiciary Committee's top Democrat, and other Democrats met in a basement room of a House office building Friday to hear a panel of lawyers and activists discuss whether Bush had committed an impeachable offense.

So several prominent people have spoken vociferously and articulately this week against the narrow issue of domestic surveillance without FISA warrants and also about the broader issue of the constitutional crisis we are facing, and this is what we get from the traditional press.

In an rather odd caveat, I was not able to transcribe the hearing using the CSPAN video because I get a pop-up message of a type that I have never seen before when trying to open that video. (I mentioned this in a comment on the latest open thread.)

The dialog box is titled, "External Protocol Request"

"An external application must be launched to handle rtsp: links. Requested link: rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/ter/ter012006_spying.rm?mode=compact

If you were not expecting this request it may be an attempt to exploit a weakness in that other program. Cancel this request unless you are sure it is not malicious."

There is a checkbox with the words beside it:
"Remember my choice for all links of this type."

You can then click a button to launch the application or cancel. Fearing what would happen if I clicked Launch Application, I canceled. (Of course, it already could have collected my IP address, I suppose.)