This exchange was a part of Monday's "Balance of Power" live chat with Tucker Carlson and Ana Marie Cox at washingtonpost.com:
"New York: I'm going to rob a bank and shoot the security guard on the way out, and when I get home cheat on my taxes and then beat my wife and children, but it's all okay: I told Nancy Pelosi about it first.
Tucker Carlson: Good plan. Did she try to stop you? Alert the authorities? Tell anyone at all about your plans? If not, she's an accessory to your crimes. So at least you'll have company in prison."
As everyone here already knows Tucker Carlson is a dumbass. In this particular instance he is a dumbass because there is no criminal accessorial liability in this situation because one's failure to report or attempt to stop a past, present, or future crime does not make one an accessory to the crime. To be an accessory a person has to do something to advance the crime or personally profit from the crime. Under our laws, with very limited exceptions of situations specifically designating individuals to be mandatory reporters such as in child abuse situations, there is no criminal sanction for anyone failing to report or failing to attempt to stop criminal activity.
So for instance, if a wife serves coffee to her husband and his accomplices while they are planning a bank robbery and later the husband comes home with the stolen cash and she tells him that she doesn't want to have anything to do with his stolen money and doesn't take or profit for any of it but continues to fail to report what she knows about the bank robbery to the police, then she is not criminally liable for anything when her husband gets busted. She is not an accessory either before or after the fact.
Therefore, assuming Pelosi knew everything Bush & Co. were up to at all points in time and said and did nothing to stop it, she is not criminally liable for anything. Morally or ethically liable perhaps, but there is no criminal or civil liability. The only way she could possibly be punished is by a House censure after a finding of an ethical violation or by her constituents holding her failure to act against her at the ballot box.
Added on top of all this are the facts that she had a duty not to even discuss with others what she was told about the torture in the secret CIA briefings and that the proper government body she would have to report criminal activity to, the Executive Branch, was the very government body that was actually committing the crimes! To extend the above metaphor (and delve a bit into the macabre) Pelosi is like the wife of the bank robber who in addition to knowing about the bank robbery is also a battered wife and her husband in addition to being a bank robber is also the Chief of Police. If she opens her mouth to report her husband there is no telling what punishment she might be dealt by her husband.
Pelosi was in a very difficult position assuming she knew about the past and/or ongoing torture. This is why the whole structure of the Executive Branch reporting covert activity to the Legislature needs restructuring. If the Executive is breaking the law in its covert activities and Congresspersons find out about it in these secret briefings, what's a Congressperson to do other than filing a letter of complaint to the President as Jane Harman did when she found out? All these secret briefings do are serve as a trap for Congresspersons by allowing the Executive Branch to later claim excuse for their crimes and mistakes because these Congresspersons knew about it. There is no real oversight.
All of this is why the Republican attempts to tie Pelosi to Bush's crimes is such a joke and a distraction. Pelosi can't be legally liable for any torture crimes because she didn't authorize any of it and she isn't an accessory under the law. In essence what the Republicans are doing is attempting to derail a real criminal investigation of Bush & Co.'s real torture crimes by seeking a House ethics investigation into a questionable ethical violation by Pelosi. Furthermore, the whole system is set up as a trap to allow such a distraction from Executive crime and malfeasance by the crazy Congressional covert activity reporting procedure. Ugh!
It's high time the MSM realized these truths and returned the spotlight back on the bank robbing husband and not on his poor battered wife.