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 told MailOnline.
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.
And at least six soldiers lost their lives in circumstances related to the Idaho native's disappearance from his post on June 30, 2009. Parents of one dead military men were told that their son perished in a mission aimed at taking down a Taliban target, not capturing a deserter.
With the circumstances of Bergdahl's disappearance no longer in any substantial doubt, the remaining outrage has focused on the Obama administration's decision to trade five high-value Taliban terror detainees for him – several years after the Pentagon decided he wasn't worth recovering.
Yet it appears the administration 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 told MailOnline on Monday morning that Obama's deputies were caught flatfooted by the intensity of public outrage in some quarters after Bergdahl's rescue by Special Forces.
'Everyone thought this would be a January 1981 moment,' the insider said, referring to the negotiated release of 52 U.S. hostages in Iran after 444 days in captivity.
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