Barack Obama broke a federal law that he signed just six months ago when he authorized the release of five high-ranking Taliban terror targets from the Guantanamo Bay detention center in exchange for the return of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, senior congressional Republicans claimed today.
And the president may also have written a new chapter in the case for his own impeachment, according to a former federal prosecutor who helped bring the 1993 World Trade Center bombers to justice.
‘The return of senior terrorists to the Taliban [is] … a “high crime and misdemeanor”,’ author Andrew C. McCarthy said.
His book ‘Faithless Execution: Building the case for Obama’s impeachment,’ is set to be published Tuesday.
Obama ‘clearly violated laws which require him to notify Congress thirty days before any transfer of terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, and to explain how the threat posed by such terrorists has been substantially mitigated,’ House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Buck McKeon of California and Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Sen. JIm Inhofe of Oklahoma said Saturday.
‘Our joy at Sergeant Berghdal’s release is tempered by the fact that President Obama chose to ignore the law, not to mention sound policy, to achieve it.’
What makes the news more controversial still is that many do not see Bergdahl as a hero. Instead he has been branded a ‘deserter’ by many of his former comrades.
An official Pentagon report in 2010 concluded that he ‘walked away’ from his post, so the U.S. Army did not exert any extraordinary efforts to find him after an initial flurry of searches, according to an insider who spoke to the Associated Press.
Obama wrongly believed it would win a PR victory big enough to eclipse any legalistic hand-wringing on Capitol Hill, and whatever objections might surface among the military rank-and-file.
A White House official said Monday morning that Obama’s deputies were caught flatfooted by the intensity of public outrage after Bergdahl’s rescue by Special Forces.
Obama thought this would be a January 1981 moment,’ a Whitehouse insider said, referring to the negotiated release of 52 U.S. hostages in Iran after 444 days in captivity.
Even Obama backing CNN is questioning Obama on this one, CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin also declared on Monday that President Barack Obama “broke the law” when his administration failed to give Congress notice of at least 30 days before releasing five ranking Taliban members from Guantanamo Bay. Toobin said that a presidential signing statement did not absolve Obama from culpability for failing to abide by the law mandating congressional notification.
“I think he clearly broke the law,” Toobin said. “The law says 30-days’ notice. He didn’t give 30-days’ notice.” Toobin added that Obama’s opinion expressed in a signing statement “is not law.”
The White House also didn’t count on was a cadre of Bergdahl’s former platoon-mates coming forward and describing him as a dishonorable soldier beyond redemption.
Obama putting senior Taliban leaders back in a position to harm U.S. national interests, McCarthy argues, could be Obama’s undoing.
‘I don’t think it’s an impeachable offense for violating the NDAA,’ he told MailOnline.
‘Congress unconstitutionally restricted the president’s war power over the disposition of enemy combatants.’
‘They could have properly done it by using the power of the purse to deny funds for the transfers, but that’s not what they did [this time].’
But transferring the five high-value prisoners to Qatar, as Obama has authorized, ‘violates the law against material support to terrorism,’ Said a former federal prosecutor-turned-author Andrew C. Mccarthy
Mccarthy also said, ” Because high crimes and misdemeanors are not statutory offenses but political wrongs that endanger the United States, the return of senior terrorists to the Taliban while we still have soldiers in harm’s way is, in my view, a “high crime and misdemeanor”.’
