Why Bush Was Right To Spare LibbyDisgrace, yes. Jail, no.
Posted Monday, July 2, 2007, at 8:05 PM ETPresident Bush's commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's 30-month prison sentence will likely prompt many people with politics similar to my own to cry bloody murder. It will be called a cover-up. It will be called a payoff for Libby's failure to implicate Vice President Dick Cheney, and perhaps even Bush himself, more directly in the Plamegate scandal. It will be compared to President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, and to Bush père's pardon of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger a mere 12 days before Weinberger was to go on trial for perjury in connection with the Iran-contra scandal. Both of these actions were wrong. But the comparison is a weak one. What Bush did was just and fair. It was the right thing to do.
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StumbleUponI don't take lightly the fact that Libby lied to federal prosecutors about his role in unmasking Valerie Plame as a covert CIA employee. The underlying offense probably wasn't illegal—because Libby probably didn't understand that Plame's identity was a government secret—but it was nonetheless disgraceful. Libby understood that, and that's why he committed perjury. His prosecution was appropriate because Bush administration officials need to know that they are not above the law. Libby's trial and conviction, I hope, got that message across to at least some of them.
But Judge Reggie Walton went overboard in sentencing Libby to 30 months. This was about twice as long as the prison term recommended by the court's probation office, and if Libby hadn't been a high-ranking government official, there's a decent chance he would have gotten off with probation, a stiff fine, and likely disbarment. Walton gave Libby 30 months and a $250,000 fine, then further twisted the knife by denying Libby's routine request to delay the sentence while his lawyers appealed it. (Libby was duly assigned the federal prison register number 28301-016, but Libby's lawyers managed to move quickly enough to keep Libby out of the slammer until his appeal was denied on July 2, the same day Bush commuted his sentence.) The voluminous pleas for leniency from Libby's A-list friends seem to have annoyed Walton, who erred on the side of severity not in spite of Libby's high position in government but because of it. Walton wanted to make an example of him.
What's the matter with that? Two words: Bill Clinton. No fair-minded person can deny that the previous president committed perjury about Monica Lewinsky while serving in the Oval Office. The country knew it, and it let him get away with it. Does that mean no government official should ever again be prosecuted for perjury? Of course not. But it does mean Walton should have wondered whether he was imposing a double standard in treating Libby more harshly because Libby worked in the White House. Is it really fair to treat White House aides more harshly than ordinary citizens when presidents get off scot-free?
It would have been wrong for Bush to pardon Libby, as many Republicans urged him to do. Libby committed a crime, and it wouldn't have been right for Bush to do anything to minimize the attendant disgrace or to lighten Libby's $250,000 burden. "The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged," Bush said. And so it should be. Bush did not intervene to spare Libby further disgrace, as Ford did with the Nixon pardon, and he didn't pre-empt a prosecution that might reveal embarrassing facts about himself, as Bush's father did. He waited until it was all over, and he acted humanely. Yes, it was inconsistent with his past indifference in such matters, particularly when he was governor of Texas. One can only hope that, having behaved decently once, he'll acquire the habit. In the meantime, bully for him.
E-mail Timothy Noah at .
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Remarks from the Fray:
Tim Noah offers up the fact that nobody has ever pursued Clinton's alleged perjury as a justification for the notion that, even though Scooter Libby was convicted in a court of law for perjury and obstruction of justice, Libby should somehow be exempt from punishment. This is indeed a curious turn of logic!
As most of us know, nobody has yet to be punished for the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. By Noah's logic, anybody who has been convicted of murder in the past thirteen years...should have their sentence commuted! But wait - at least with the Simpson case, we know that somebody committed murder. With Clinton's alleged perjury, the allegation has not even made it to the level of an indictment. Given that Republicans have been running the DoJ for the past seven years, and given the detailed voluminous report of Ken Starr, surely somebody, somewhere would have pursued an indictment of Clinton if the perjury that Noah alleges were so "obvious".
Perhaps there was a difference between the Clinton case and the Libby case that explains why one never saw a court and the other never was prosecuted and the other was successfully prosecuted in an orderly, legal manner?
Perhaps the best explanation is the simplest. At the time of the impeachment, after all, President Clinton brought forward a letter signed by a large number of prosecutors who affirmed that they would not pursue any indictment against Clinton based on the evidence presented. For starters, the major basis for any perjury indictment would come down to a "he said, she said" interpretation of what actually happened between the President and Monica Lewinsky. Given that Lewinsky herself is an admitted perjurer, this would hardly be much of a legal basis for pursuing a perjury conviction.
The second problem is that the entire pejury allegation against Clinton is based on the convoluted definition of "sexual relations" that was used by the Jones' lawyers during his deposition. Clinton's legal defense throughout has been that he thought he was giving a misleading, but technically true, answer to the question that was posed to him, based on the definition given to him. I dare say that, given the convoluted definition that was used in that deposition, and given what we know about what happened between Clinton and Lewinsky, the President would have a legal defense there.
Ultimately, there really is not a strong parallel between the Clinton non-prosecution and the Libby conviction. But, for a partisan Democrat, it is particularly galling to see anybody use the misuse of the legal system by the Republicans in the Clinton case to justify the misuse of the legal system by the Republicans in the Libby case. […]
The commutation of Libby's sentence is an atrocious use of pardon power to prop up transparently political ends. Indeed, the Republicans have used pardon power repeatedly for exactly this kind of purpose from the days of the Presidency of Gerald Ford. What about Americans who want to see the laws of the nation enforced, regardless of the partisan affiliation of whoever is the target of prosecution? The legacy of Richard Nixon, Cap Weinberger, Eliott Abrams, Oliver North and now Scooter Libby is that, if you are a Republican, you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want, if you are seeking to increase the power of the Republican party. There is no way to read this sequence of events to avoid the conclusion that the Republicans in power have repeatedly put their own personal interests ahead of the interests of the justice system. Amazingly, Patrick Fitzgerald and Judge Walton managed to place a small speed bump in this process, but with the swing of a pen, George W. Bush has denied justice to the people of America who say that no person should be so politically connected as to escape the law.
--RickDesper
(To reply, click here.)
Your attempt to reduce the astounding case of Libby and the leak to workaday, business-as-usual politics, and to apply a fair-mindedness that must cut against whatever you perceive to be the Democratic line, is just too much. There is nothing workaday, business-as-usual about what Bush and Cheney have been up to for the last 70 months. This isn't about political parties and winning and losing and being honest and fair and avoiding things like the politicization of politics. It's not about letting their guys go because our guys got off when they got caught doing something remotely related, if you squint, kind of.
Please, try hard to understand how appallingly calculated all of this was. Libby was involved in a complicated and highly successful propaganda campaign. This campaign turned illegal when he and his handlers decided that it would serve the interests of their war to disclose the identity of a CIA agent involved in nonproliferation work. Libby understood the legal status of his actions, and this is why he lied about what he did to the grand jury, over and over. He also presumably knew that the president had his ass covered, which explains why he persisted in lying even when the clouds started to gather. Now that his sentence has been commuted, he can avoid further testimony by pleading the fifth. And, of course, everyone from Gonzales on down now knows, if they didn't already, that they can expect similar treatment should they need to lie to another prosecutor or another grand jury to protect the guys at the top. The guys at the top are in need of a whole lot of protection of this sort, in case you hadn't noticed, so you can appreciate how useful this message is.
In this context you have to be seriously deluded to suggest that Clinton, who was never convicted of perjury, can even begin to provide any kind of precedent.
--hiltfredus
(To reply, click here.)
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