http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070210/ap_on_...eak_white_house WASHINGTON - David Addington, chief legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, says he was taken aback when the White House started making public pronouncements about the CIA leak investigation. In the fall of 2003, President Bush's press secretary was categorically denying that either Karl Rove or I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was involved in exposing the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA employee married to a critic of the war in Iraq. "Why are you making these statements?" Addington asked White House communications director Dan Bartlett. "Your boss is the one who wanted" them, Bartlett replied, referring to Cheney. With that, "I shut up," Addington recalled recently for jurors in Libby's CIA leak trial, which begins its fourth week on Monday with Libby's lawyers calling their first witnesses. "Get the full story out," Cheney told aides, according to Libby's grand jury testimony. In the Libby trial, Bush comes across mostly as an interested observer. MJ Here. Doesn't this last sentence remind you of bush daddy during Iran-Contra who testified to a Grand Jury that every time Iran-Contra was discussed in the oval office he magically took a powder and wasn't there?
Unfortunately for Bush, he is more than just an interested observer in this, because he said he would fire anyone involved in the leak. But as we've seen over and over with him, what he says ain't what he does.
Well, maybe that promise to fire those involved was a little extemporaneous add-on that he didn't clear with his handlers. Afterwards he was taken aside and told "It was *US* you moron" and so nothing has happened.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Feb 10 2007, 03:40 PM) [snapback]388181[/snapback]</div> Can the president even request the resignation of the vice president, or is the only recourse an impeachment? I mean, the VP is an elected official and can't technically be fired, but can he be forced to resign?
Politics being what it is, an elected official can always be pressured to resign, but the only way to force him out of office would be impeachment. There's nothing to stop W from telling Cheney, I don't like you anymore and I want you to resign. Or the GOP bigwigs could tell him he's a liability to the party and they want him gone. But he can tell them all to go suck a fat one. For that matter, you can write him a letter telling him he's bad for the country and you'd like him to resign, not that he cares a fig what any of us think. Of course, if he became a liability to the folks at the big corporations who really pull the strings, they could probably arrange an accident to get him out of the way. But the only legal way to force an elected official out of ofice is impeachment.
