How should Democrats investigate Bush/GOP?

[ck4829]

Here's some ways that it could be what would be investigated first.

1. Alphabetically? (Abramoff, Jack)

2. Chronologically? (Bush Administration making up stories that outgoing Clinton Administration vandalized White House)

3. Random? (Halliburton, Iraq War, etc.)

4. Some other method?

[Ian David]

1. They need to be aggressively interrogated.

Within the limits of the (Bush's) law, of course.

[meegbear]

2. IMO, they only need to investigate one thing ...

Cheney's energy policy meetings in the spring/summer of 2001. This is the Pandora's Box to all the major events of the past 6 years.

[BuyingThyme]

3. Yes.

[rock]

4. Massive parallelism

The more the merrier.

[leftofthedial]

5. using RICO and the Patriot Act

and then start with war profiteering

and campaign financing and election fraud

then work on 9-11 negligence

[Lexingtonian]

6. easy

Begin one investigation into each federal department/agency and executive office. It doesn't matter what it's about specifically as long as it appears important enough to look into. It's safe to assume that all the scandals and crimes and coverups glom to the same people, and when the evidence trail of pursuing one leads to them we'll find mother lodes of scandals and abuses.

This kind of 'go big, sweep up everything' approach has the virtue of getting insiders showing up and telling where to look and for what. It should also lead to a slew of resignations, defections, and other forms of high speed departures once the first layer of defenses is breached, exposing group after group.

There will be two kinds of defensive manouvers. One is document dumping and other forms of concealment. (That's where inside sources explaining what to look for help a lot, and maybe volunteers would in order.) The other is claims of executive privilege and "national security". But that line of defense is overstretched- it should be possible to cave it in in places and break up one cell of resistance after another.

It could all stall and wear down, but some investigations are going to be successful, others less, and the successful ones will lead to insiders who sell out the holdouts.

Anyway, it's trench warfare, but we have the tanks and heavy mortars now. If our guys smash enough quickly enough, and outflank 'em, the defenders are going to be running away en masse. They don't have enough "executive privilege" to protect more than a few of themselves