Redstate

The President Must Pardon Scooter Libby Now

By Mark I Posted in Featured Stories | Law — Comments (21) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Time has run out on Scooter Libby. Today, a Federal appeals court in Washington unanimously rejected Libby’s request to delay the application of his sentence in the Plamegate™ Leak Trial. This means that Libby will have to report to jail while the rest of the appeals process runs its course. The New York Times reports that the US Bureau of Prisons has not yet assigned him to a facility or given him a surrender date, but it has assigned him a federal inmate number: 28301-016.

Members of Libby’s defense fund are now publicly calling for the president to pardon Libby.

"I hope it puts pressure on the president. He's a man of pronounced loyalties and he should have loyalty to Scooter Libby," said former Ambassador Richard Carlson, a member of Libby's defense fund. "It would be a travesty for him to go off to prison. The president will take some heat for it. So what? He takes heat for everything."

Mr. Cohen is correct. The time has come for the President to pardon Libby. President Bush has stated that he would not consider a pardon until the legal system has run its course. I don’t believe that in making that statement, the president expected Libby to spend one day in jail. The most likely scenario was for Libby to be convicted and remain free on appeals which would consume the time between the conviction and the end of the president’s term, when he could be pardoned. But that has not come to fruition. Instead of facing two years of legal wrangling and legal bills in the millions, for which he could raise money to help defray the costs, Libby now faces 2 ½ years in a Federal Penitentiary for loyally doing his job for the President. Mr. Bush must return that loyalty now.

Read on…

The Bush 43 Administration has been marked by one overriding trait, loyalty. President Bush has famously stuck by his subordinates, some for too long. He has rightly stood by embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales through the pseudo-scandal over the firing of eight United States Attorneys. He wrongly stuck by White House Counsel cum Supreme Court Nominee Harriet Miers for a crucial month in the face of unrelenting criticism from his conservative base. He rightly rebuffed ad nauseam demands for the head of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, until wrongly giving in after the Democratic takeover of Congress last November. He wrongly expressed confidence in the clearly in-over-his-head FEMA Director Mike Brown after Hurricane Katrina for close to two weeks until rightly replacing him. Libby has yet to receive the loyalty from the president that the least of these men and women have received, yet he faces a far more serious fate.

Libby was convicted of lying to FBI agents and the grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame’s name to the press. This was a process crime outside the bounds of the original charge given to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald by a politically spooked Justice Department. It has since been learned that Fitzgerald knew the identity of the leaker almost immediately upon commencing his investigation. It was Richard Armitage. Armitage has admitted to being Novak’s source. Yet, he was never charged with any crime. Instead, Fitzgerald continued to investigate a question for which the answer was known in hopes of unearthing a conspiracy at the highest levels of government. This would-be Woodward and Bernstein of a prosecutor abused the authority given to him by continuing his investigation and all he has to show for it is a conviction of a man with a faulty memory. There was never a conspiracy, and Fitzgerald knew it, better than most, all along.

Libby was engaged in talking to reporters about Joe Wilson’s wife as part of his job responsibilities in the Vice-President’s office. He was engaging in political pushback against Administration critics, including Wilson, in an attempt to counter the developing Bush Lied™ mantra. Wilson’s New York Times op-ed was the cannon blast that started the avalanche. It has since become part of the narrative of the Iraq war that the Bush Administration gave deliberately false reasons for going to war in Iraq when nothing could be further from the truth.

The Bush administration acted on faulty intelligence and made some poor judgments in executing the war and especially in handling the aftermath, but it did not lie. If it did, then every time the Clinton Administration lobbed missiles at Iraq and used Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs as a justification, it was lying too. President Clinton had people to do political pushback; one of them was Sandy Berger. As National Security Advisor, Berger had access to much of the same intelligence on Iraq that President Bush would later have. Indeed, he had lots of access to classified documents even after his tenure in the White House. But, he’s not facing any jail time either.

The fact is that had President Bush or someone in his administration had the courage to call Joe Wilson on the carpet immediately after his op-ed appeared, instead of trying to do it in a whisper campaign through subordinates, Libby would not be facing jail time today. It wouldn’t have been too hard to show that Wilson was a political hack and a liar himself. Even the Senate Intelligence Committee was able to determine as much in its investigation into the pre-war use of intelligence, with the concurrence of committee Democrats. Be that as it may, the president decided to handle the matter in a behind the scenes way and chose Libby to help in the effort. This is standard operating procedure for political staff in the White House and should not result in jail time.

As for President Bush, Mr. Cohen is again right. The president’s political position couldn’t be any weaker. His poll numbers, though higher than Congress’s, are in the mid 30s, the campaign to succeed him is getting loads of attention, he has just lost face badly with the base over immigration, and Congressional Democrats are hell bent on investigating every single decision he has made as president since day one. There will never be a good time to pardon Libby because of the hue and cry it will raise from the left and from Democrats. But it must be done. Scooter Libby should never see the inside of a Federal prison. Libby has taken a lot of heat for the president these last two years. It is now time for the president to show his famous regard for loyalty. He must return the favor and take the heat that comes with pardoning Libby, and he must do it now.

There is no guarantee that the base will rally to the president if he does so, but this sorry affair has moved far beyond political calculations. It has become about right and wrong. It is wrong for Libby to serve time for loyally doing his job on behalf of the President of the United States. It would be equally wrong for the president, the only man in the country who can stop it, to allow it to happen.