Castle’s Silence Enters Day Three: Washington Post Inches toward a Bush Impeachment

While Mike Castle is still strangely silent on Bush’s misuse of the justice department and Gonzales’ outright anti-American activities, a kos diarists connects the dots in a Washongton Post editorial.

Okay, so they never actually use the i-word. But there’s no mistaking what this most infuriatingly supine of major editorial pages has committed tonight, starting with the sly title of the link on washingtonpost.com:

“What Did Bush Know, and When?”

The unmistakable echo, of course, is the Howard Baker question that became the yardstick for Richard M. Nixon’s inexorable slide toward impeachment: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” And that’s just what the Post editorial page is demanding to know in tomorrow’s editorial–which inches towards a call for this president’s impeachment, as you’ll see across the jump.

The subject is the now-infamous episode in which the White House pressured a gravely ill John Ashcroft to approve the secret wiretapping program his own staff had already deemed illegal, as James B. Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this week. Here’s what has the WaPo beginning to dance, ever so gingerly, with the ghosts of 1973-74:

It doesn’t much matter whether President Bush was the one who phoned Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s hospital room before the Wednesday Night Ambush in 2004. It matters enormously, however, whether the president was willing to have his White House aides try to strong-arm the gravely ill attorney general into overruling the Justice Department’s legal views. It matters enormously whether the president, once that mission failed, was willing nonetheless to proceed with a program whose legality had been called into question by the Justice Department.

– Leaves on the Current