Yoo: Impeach Bush? Why Not?Esquire has posted the transcript of its wide ranging interview with former Justice Department official John Yoo. While Yoo is best known for his time at the Justice Department crafting jaw-dropping legal opinions authorizing torture, the interview shows that he harbors some unexpected opinions. For instance, who knew that the guy who gave the legal green light to the administration to pursue their most controversial policies takes a broad view of impeachment and Congressional oversight?
This is from the interview, where Yoo is speaking about his time as the general counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) during the late 1990s:
Certainly there was this whole industry of people outside the Congress, all these Clinton-haters, who were making a career out of attacking Clinton, but I thought it was a legitimate subject for investigation. The president and his advisors were trying to cover up financial misconduct or sexual harassment. I think Congress is allowed to ask about that. For example, I think Congress is fully allowed to ask about interrogation procedures. That’s one of their roles. They should have oversight. It can be crippling, obviously, to the executive if Congress goes forward guns blazing in its oversight powers, but I don’t think there’s anything unconstitutional about it.
Certainly for Hatch it wasn’t vindictive. I can’t speak for everyone who worked in the Senate. Hatch thought there were things that could be wrong here.
Clinton certainly didn’t make it easy. Same as the Bush administration. Knowing what you know now about what they had done, if they had been much more open and forthcoming coming out of the gate, it would have been better for everybody.
But I will say this: I wasn’t in favor of impeachment. I don’t think what Clinton did rose to the level of what impeachment is really for. I think if people in Congress wanted to impeach President Bush they could, not because he committed a crime but because they think he’s a bad president.
That was the phrase [“high crimes and misdemeanors”] that came from Britain, and the British used to, under that phrase, remove people just because they screwed up a war.
There are great examples. Allegedly these were the same standards of impeachments when they impeached a minister because the British suffered a setback in the war with the Dutch. It wasn’t a crime, but you were a bad leader. But it has to be something of significance to the state. Clinton, what he did didn’t seem to rise to that level.
