My concern was not with regard to this particular case, but rather with regard to the precedent it appears to be setting.
I thought I made that pretty clear, but you made no attempt to show why “fault” distributed as I claimed could not be used to shelter all parties. You only said it wasn’t properly applicable in this particular case.
In some future case where actual criminal acts are performed after legal opinions have been obtained from Justice Dept. attorneys, which of the three groups should be held legally responsible?
The simple answer is, none of them - assuming of course we're talking about events that took place in a prior administration. The framers were wise to put a mechanism in place to indict, convict and remove sitting presidents from office. This controversy was no "secret" to the 2006 session of congress. Nancy Pelosi could have held hearing, and if the facts and evidence supported it, she could have moved for the impeachment of President Bush. But she didn't, and the reason she didn't was precisely because the politics of that decision would have spelled disaster for the newly minted Democrat majority. You see, this is just as much a matter of politics as it is a matter of law.
The moment we head down this road of investigating administrations once they leave office, is the moment we place the country in a death spiral, from which there may not be a recovery.
When Clinton left office, many in the grass-roots conservative movement wanted all manner of investigation into the Clinton administration. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and we didn't see that transpire. Ford was another man that put country ahead of his own personal political viability. He pardoned Nixon, ending any chances of him being elected to the office he held but he saved the country from 24 months of turmoil, and he kept a horrible precedent from being set.
Make no mistake, irrespective of the liberal protestations about this being an investigation to "uphold the rule of law", this is nothing but blatant and overt appeasement of Barack Obama's rabid leftists base - nothing more, nothing less. Bush (and the GOP Congressional leadership) was right not to indulge such folly in 2001. Obama, once again proving that he's not half the man of Bush, to say nothing of Ford, can't contain his glee in this ex post facto witch-hunt.