John McTiernan used to be best known as the director of Die Hard and its second sequel, The Hunt for Red October, and (shudder) Last Action Hero. The last ten years have not been kind; his 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair had its modest, reheated charms, but the other movie he released that year, The 13th Warrior, sank like a stone, and the two films he's released since then, Rollerball (2002) and Basic (2003), both hit with a splat. McTiernan would of course love to redeem himself by getting back to work and turning out a new string of hits, but McTiernan says that his career has been sidelined by his legal problems stemming from the Anthony Pellicano case. In 2006, two years before Pellicanos was convicted on charges of illegal wiretapping and racketeering, McTiernan pled guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about the case. Sometime after that, he entered into a prolonged legal battle over whether he had the right to withdraw his plea, and last February, his request was granted. According to McTiernan, the FBI, which has indicated that it will continue to pursue its case against him, has stuck him in a position of legal limbo that has rendered him insurable, and therefoere unemployable, by Hollywood studios.

Now McTiernan has finished a film, a change-of-pace project called--breathe deep--The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove. As the New York Times reports, the movie is a personal screed "that accuses the Bush administration of having pursued the Pellicano case as part of a far-ranging conspiracy under the direction of Karl Rove to prosecute Democrats." The film's argument ties the Pellicano prosecution to highly publicized instances of what some have seen as politically motivated prosecutions during the Bush administration, and specifically charges that l'affaire Pellicano was part of a plot to generate embarrassing publicity that could be used against Hillary Clinton if she had been the Democratic nominee for the presidency. McTiernan narrates the film and also appears on camera at the end to lecture the audience about the dangers of using the legal system as a political tool. Rather than try to distribute this baby to theaters, McTiernan says he hopes to soon post it on a web site , which "will be maintained by the group Victims of Karl Rove Prosecutions." Although Karl Rove himself declined to speak to the Times about McTiernan's charges, one of his elves did issue a statement saying that, “I suspect Secretary Clinton and Mr. Rove are in agreement that Mr. McTiernan is off his rocker.”