Leahy Endorses 'Truth Commission' to Investigate Bush

Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress at 3:03 PM on February 9, 2009.

Today in a speech at Georgetown University, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said that he -- like other congressional Democrats, such Rep. John Conyers (MI) and Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Carl Levin (MI) -- supports the idea of a "truth commission" to investigate abuses at the Department of Justice:

One path to that goal would be a reconciliation process, a truth commission. We could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair minded without any ax to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth. People would be told to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of conducting criminal indictments but to assemble the facts.

Indeed, such a process could involve subpoena powers and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions for anything accept perjury in order to get to the full truth.

Leahy later added, "Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened. And sometimes is the best way to move forward is to find out the truth, find out what happened. And we do that to make sure it never happens again."

Tagged as: bush, leahy, doj

Amanda Terkel is Deputy Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Deputy Editor for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.