You’re ignorant about many things, including the nature of “impeachable offenses.” Pay attention to what a famous Republican once said:

“An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history”

You want a Bill of Particulars, that may take a few days to research the legal threshold for cabinet officals — impeachment runs under a different legal preinciple than criminal charges. I never impeached a cabinet offical before, so I don’t have any pre-research done.
My reason for mentioning it was your post seemed to imply that Congress is incapable of impeaching cabinet officials, and I was trying to point out that it is legally possible, in that is has happened in the past.

Grounds? For Gonzales, lying to Congress, as I discussed above. If on nothing else, he lied about not talking to anybody in regards to the fired attys. Since lying to Congress under oath is a crime, I assume Felonious behavior would be gounds to impeach (but again I’m guessing at this point).

Give me a few days for a legal standard.

As for the others, I never mentioned them — in this thread at least, I’m talking about Fredo. One thing at a time.

…it is legal for Congress to impeach a cabinet official.

Please identify the impeachable offenses committed by Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Rice and the other administration officials who have been the targets of repeated calls for resignation by cantankerous Democrats, and I’ll gladly concede your point.

Oh, and by the by, David Iglesias is a f’ing national hero. If the republicans had a guy like that running, I’d vote for him in a heartbeat. Integrity. But unfortunately, a guy like that would never run in the first place.

@daveinboca:
“But the substance of the Gonzalez case involves all sorts of intricate covert back-pages of top secret programs—-so the Dems play politics and pull off another “process crime” show trial a la Scooter Libby.”

Really? What the heck does firing a US Attorney have to do with “covert back-pages and top secret programs”? Inglesias sure seems like he was canned for not bringing the voter-fraud case the New Mexico GOP wanted brought — care to explain how this has anything to do with the War on Terror (copyright 2001 W’s White House). Lam sure seems like she was canned for digging into the Cunningham affair a little too effectively (what was it she was told? You have days, not weeks, to get the hell out of your office — forget the investigation). Cummings ( think it was Cummings) got canned for not bringing a bogus voter-fraud case against ACORN. Schlozman gets rushed in to file the case. Again, what the heck does this have to do with National Security? “If I told you, I’d have to kill you” just stops being a viable defense at some point.
You complain that this is all just for show. While I don’t doubt the Dems are milking it for all they can squeeze out if it, does that mean that Gonzales hasn’t been lying to Congress? If a cop stops a speeding vehicle because the driver was black, does that mean the car wasn’t speeding? You compared it to the “sham” of the Libby trial — so you don’t think Libby lied? W does. The Judge and Jury were pretty confident of it. Why don’t you think he lied? How were the lies anything but an attempt to cover up the “smear Wilson” campaign? How does showing that the yellowcake uranium story was pure crap merit a smear campaign? Oh, thats right, you cant tell us — national security.
ANY government, Right or Left, that refuses to tell its citizenry what the hell is going on, and relies on “just trust us,” is anathema to the American Ideal. Answer me this: are you defending Gonzales because he is unfairly being picked on (i.e. didn’t lie), or because he’s on the Side of Goodness, and therefore must be protected regardless of his actions?

Washington Post:
“When Alberto R. Gonzales was asked during his January 2005 confirmation hearing whether the Bush administration would ever allow wiretapping of U.S. citizens without warrants, he initially dismissed the query as a “hypothetical situation.”

But when Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) pressed him further, Gonzales declared: “It is not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes.”

As Mr. Eggen notes, the warrantless wiretapping had already benn going on for years at that point. A flat, bald-faced lie. I suppose you could argue that he HAD to lie, to protect our secrets, but if thats the case why not give one of his “I can’t go into that” answers? There’s only one logical explanation — he thought he could get away with lying, no one would be the wiser, and no harm, no foul.

This is the chief law enforcement officer of my country, lying (repeatedly) to my elected representatives.

Sidenote: with all of the “it must have been two seperate programs” defending going on, its intersting to note that the only members of the Gang of Eight who have spoken out so far have flatly refuted his version of the 2004 meeting — everybody agrees it was the TSP that was discussed. Well, everybody erxcept Gonzales. Guess all those Senators must be idiots, because if its everybody’s word versus Gonzales, well, everybody must be wrong. Thank God there aren’t any records of the meeting — hate to have definitive proof of what happened or what was said.

And Tony Snow can’t figure out why “no transcript” interviews with Admin officials doesn’t sound like a good offer.

If it was legal, why did Ashcroft et al threaten to quit over it?

And there’s another problem. On 5/11/06, Bush said we don’t do data mining: “we’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.”

So this latest spin from the White House, apparently intended to make Gonzales looks like less of a liar, has the unavoidable side-effect of making Bush look like more of a liar.

But the substance of the Gonzalez case involves all sorts of intricate covert back-pages of top secret programs—so the Dems play politics and pull off another “process crime” show trial a la Scooter Libby. The Dems are perfecting this gotcha-game legal trickery to the point that they are tying up the government completely in investigation/prosecution and neglecting legislation. The American public will only be diverted from this circus-trial syndrome for a short time before again falling into accepting the liberal MSM shibboleths as virtually true.

The MSM/Hollyweird/academicide nexus has allies in the trial lawyer community which stand them in good stead in this purge-trial parody of democracy. But can the plurality of conservatives in the US body politic withstand the constant drumbeat & siren songs of a media that has pushed GWB into a corner? Can they separate the voodoo chants from actual skullduggery?

From the way that the Clinton history of “Johnnie Chung, Charlie Trie and the slew of illegal fundraising cases that the Clinton Justice Department, according to an Inspector General’s audit did not handle correctly? Ties to Chinese intelligence, money laundering at a Buddhist Temple, Commerce Department waivers in exchange for cash” were all covered over by a pliant media, the Dems have an advantage.

With houseboys like jukebox… et al digging endlessly & myriads of Waxman wannabes in Congress ready to slap subpoenas on the GWB agencies & departments, the Dems can do their damnedest to thwart a real marketplace of ideas by overloading the circuits with spurious snipe hunts.

Because when ideas are put forward, the Dems are definitely behind the curve.