Is There Still Time to Impeach the President before Nov. 2?

John Dean, the former counsel to President Richard Nixon, made a case last year for impeaching President George W. Bush if the president intentionally misled Congress and the public into backing a war with Iraq. "To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked," Dean wrote in a June 6, 2003 column for findlaw.com. "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose." On Wednesday, a 918-page report released by the Iraqi Survey Group, headed by former United Nations weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, said Iraq eliminated all of its illicit arms programs in the mid-1990s, shortly after the first Gulf War. In other words, Iraq wasn't a threat. But in the months leading up to the war, Bush and several other senior members of his administration said the threat was real. [more ]