Sleaze, leaks and an indictment add up to the worst presidential crisis since Nixon. And it will get worse. The White House has lost one key man but the whole chain of command may be engulfed by a scandal slowly revealing the lies that led to war.
Presidential second terms are prone to scandals, from Bill Clinton's embarrassments over Monica Lewinsky to Ronald Reagan's implication in the Iran-Contra imbroglio. But the troubles now circling George Bush's White House could be even worse than Watergate.
It might not appear that way at first. Mr Bush is unlikely to have to join Richard Nixon, the only president in US history forced to resign from office. But the issues raised by "Plamegate" - the leaking of the identity of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent - are far more significant than those involved in the "second-rate burglary" of the Democratic National Committee's offices in Washington's Watergate complex in the 1970s. They go to the heart of why America, and its faithful ally, Britain, went to war in Iraq.
The immediate problems are bad enough. On Friday Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted for obstruction of justice and making false statements to a grand jury. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed to investigate Ms Plame's outing, announced that he was not indicting Karl Rove, President Bush's closest adviser, although he remains under investigation and may have to give evidence against Mr Libby. The administration and its friends have done their best to portray the Plamegate affair as an obscure, "inside the Beltway" scandal, of interest only to Washington obsessives and conspiracy theorists. On Thursday evening, as the whole of Washington speculated over his position, Mr Rove did his best to reinforce that view.
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article323311.ece
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