hopefully the Dems will call his bluff

Turley: By Refusing To Pardon Torture Officials, Bush Is Allowing Democrats To Repair His Legacy

Last night on MSNBC Rachel Maddow highlighted a report from the Wall Street Journal that said that President Bush is unlikely to pardon any officials involved in engineering or executing the Bush administration’s torture program. According to the Wall Street Journal report, the White House believes that the Justice Department’s torture memos give the officials all the legal cover they need.

Maddow’s guest, constitutional legal scholar Jonathan Turley, said that he also believes that Bush is unlikely to pardon his torture officials, but for reasons that have little to do with the torture memos:

TURLEY: What the administration is doing is they know that the people that want him to pardon our torture program is primarily the Democrats, not the Republicans. The Democratic leadership would love to have a pardon so they could go to their supporters and say, “Look, there’s really nothing we could do.”

Well, the Bush administration is calling their bluff. They know that the Democratic leadership will not allow criminal investigations or indictments.

Turley explained that without the pardons, Bush is clearing the way for Democrats to repair the president’s torture legacy. Bush will be “able to say there’s nothing stopping indictments or prosecutions but a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House didn’t think there was any basis for it,” Turley said.

(Think Progress)