Former Federal Prosecutor Drafts Indictment Against the President

Watch 128k stream       Watch 256k stream

A former federal prosecutor named Elizabeth de la Vega has drafted an indictment of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top officials for tricking the nation into war and for conspiracy to defraud the United States. 

De La Vega spent 20 years in the U.S. Attorneys Office. She was an assistant U.S. attorney in Minneapolis as well as a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Branch Chief in San Jose, California.

• Elizabeth de la Vega, former federal prosecutor and author of the new book "United States v. George W. Bush et al."

AMY GOODMAN: Elizabeth de la Vega's mock indictment appears in a new book entitled United States v. George W. Bush, et al.. De la Vega spent 20 years in the US Attorney's office. She was an Assistant US Attorney in Minneapolis, as well as a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Branch Chief in San Jose, California. She joins us here in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now!

ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA: Thanks for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how did you come up with this? What made you decide to do this?

ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA: Well, I was an Assistant US Attorney up until 2004, so I was still working as an Assistant US Attorney when the President and his senior aides started their marketing campaign for the war. And at the same time, of course, the Enron case was happening, and I was observing the similarities between what the President was doing in order to deceive the public regarding the war and the same type of techniques that the Enron people used to defraud their investors. And, of course, in the case of the Enron fraud, the public was absolutely outraged, and rightly so. And they have been, in the main, held accountable.

But yet, the President, who has caused this fraud that has obviously been far graver in scope and the consequences have been horrific, has not been held accountable in any way. So, I wanted to explain to people in a very non-charged atmosphere, which is the atmosphere of a hypothetical grand jury, exactly how this fits into the elements of a crime, which is conspiracy to defraud the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: So, lay out your case. Lay out this indictment.

ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA: Okay. Well, first of all, in order to understand the case, you have to understand the law. And a conspiracy to defraud the United States is in Title 18, United States Code, Section 371. It’s a statute that’s been around for over a hundred years. It was charged against people in the Watergate era and also Iran-Contra. And what it means is basically taking concerted action to use deceit or what’s called “trickery” to interfere with any branch of government or an agency. And, of course, Congress is a branch of government.

So, the case, as I lay out in the -- it’s a hypothetical indictment, of course. But the case really starts with the actions of the administration right after 9/11 and proceeds with how they used the fear that was engendered by 9/11, and they actually aggravated that fear. And then they started off, as we all recall, with sort of generally false assertions that had no basis in fact, such as that Iraq was a grave and gathering danger, when at the time the National Intelligence Estimate said no such thing.

And when those types of generalized false statements were not persuasive by the summer of 2002, they started with the White House Iraq Group, and then they became more specific, and they used a combination of half-truths. We have the story of Vice President Cheney recurringly saying that we know that there are chemical weapons, because Saddam Hussein's son-in-law told us, while, in fact, that was a half-truth, because the other half of the story was that he also had told us that they were destroyed. We have Condoleezza Rice saying these aluminum tubes are only suitable for nuclear weapon centrifuges. Well, at that time, there are at least 14 reports available to the administration which showed that that was at least dubious and actually controverted by our nuclear experts.

We have Rumsfeld saying we know where the weapons of mass destruction are, north, south, east and west of Tikrit, somewhat. Well, that was what we would call in the law, and it’s really kind of a common sense thing, a statement made with reckless disregard for the truth, because the law actually prohibits people who are in a position of authority, who are trying to persuade people either to do something, to buy something -- it applies to investment fraud or the executive branch -- from making statements without actually having any basis in fact. And I don't think people actually realized that. It’s sort of an intuitive thing, but I don't think people realized that the law actually prohibits that, as well.