Give the People What They Want
David Weigel | July 3, 2007, 11:10am
The first poll on the Scooter Libby commutation pinpoints the source of those howls of outrage and despair piercing through your windows: the 60 percent of the country who disagree with the decision.
President Bush has commuted the portion of Scooter Libby's sentence that would have required Libby to serve 30 months in prison. Libby remains a convicted felon - he still must pay a 250 thousand dollar fine and serve 2 years of probation - but he will not go to prison. Based on what you now know, should the President have pardoned Scooter Libby completely? Should the president have taken no action, and left the prison sentence in place? ... Or, do you agree with the president's decision to commute the prison portion of the Libby sentence?
17% Pardoned Scooter Libby Completely
60% Left The Prison Sentence In Place
21% Agree With The President's Decision
No surprises here. 62 percent of conservatives think the decision was just right or not quite Scooter-friendly enough, as do 58 percent of Republicans. But those are the only groups that support the decision. The third-highest bloc of support? A whopping 45 percent of Hispanics. So expect the immigration reform bill to ooze back into the Senate next week.
This might be the most boring story on the planet but it's a goldmine for cable news bookers. Here was
American Spectator Editor-in-Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. on Hardball yesterday playing the role of a fattened goose for David Shuster's rusty meat-ax.
SHUSTER: Bob, did The American Spectator take a position on President Clinton‘s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice?TYRRELL: Well, The Spectator aside, I did in my recent book...
SHUSTER: You supported it, right?
TYRRELL: I assume you‘re alluding to my recent book on Clinton and retirement which I....
SHUSTER: And you supported the impeachment, right?
TYRRELL: Yes. Well—but I thought you were talking about...
(CROSSTALK)
SHUSTER: My point is, what‘s the difference between supporting an impeachment of President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice and why not then support Scooter Libby going to prison when he is convicted by a jury with a Republican judge, and he is two-and-a-half years?
TYRRELL: Well, I have an entirely different take on it.
D.A. Ridgely | July 3, 2007, 12:21pm | #
I cop to being not upset at all at Bush's commutation of Libby's prison sentence. Yeah, I think he lied under oath trying to shield his boss and, yeah, I think Fitzgerald pursued Libby as opposed to the others hoping to flip him to get to Cheney. I don't think Fitzgerald, himself, was politically motivated, but when you consider the context in which he was appointed as a special prosecutor, the years he spent and the indictments (or lack thereof) he finally sought, I continue to believe that the heart of the matter was partisan politics. YMMV.
Subtract the political context and what are you left with? Misleading investigators and twice making false statements under oath to a grand jury. Serious, but not 2.5 years incarceration serious when you consider the rest of the consequences that have befallen Libby.
(Here, BTW, is the
indictment against Libby for anyone wishing to sort out the facts as alleged and apparently accepted as true by the jury.]
Okay, so life is unfair and lots of other people get screwed in the criminal justice system and blah, blah, blah. All true. But the better analogy here is not to Clinton but to Sandy Berger. Better, not perfect.
Berger took five copies of the same classified document with him and cut up three of those documents. (Apparently he only needed one extra copy to check to see if the first one was correct. The others went to, what, classified ransom notes?) So we have an underlying case of a breach of national security, a statutory offense. Berger eventually copped to a misdemeanor, an option probably not offered Libby but which (yes, for purely partisan political reasons) Libby was not in a position to accept anyway since the price would have been to roll on Cheney.
Anyway, Berger was fined $50k, got two years probation, did 100 hours of community service and relinquished his law license. (This sentence was, btw, more severe than the recommended sentence.)
Again, I'm saying these are only roughly analogous and if you want to argue Berger should have served time, too, okay. Bearing in mind, however, the original purpose of the special prosecutor and the end results of his investigation, I'd say sending Libby to prison because Fitzgerald couldn't make his case against Cheney or Rove, etc. is unreasonable.
Malcolm J. | July 3, 2007, 12:26pm | #
We're not talking about Sandy Berger or Hillary Clinton, John, no matter how much you would like to change the subject. And regarding Libby's memory problems here's a snippet from the AP timeline of events:
_June 23: Libby meets with Times reporter Judith Miller. During the meeting, Miller says, Libby tells her that Wilson's wife might work at a bureau of the CIA. Libby denies saying that.
_July 6: The New York Times publishes an opinion piece by Wilson under the headline "What I Didn't Find in Africa" and he appears on NBC's "Meet the Press." Wilson said he doubted Iraq had recently obtained uranium from Niger and thought Cheney's office was told of the results of his trip.
_July 7: Libby meets with then-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. Fleischer says Libby tells him that Wilson's wife works at the CIA and that the information is "hush hush." Libby denies that.
_July 8: Libby meets with Miller again. She recalls Libby saying he believes Wilson's wife works for the CIA. Libby denies telling her that.
• July 8: Columnist Robert Novak interviews Armitage, who tells him that Wilson's wife works for the CIA. Novak says this was confirmed the next day by White House political adviser Karl Rove.
_July 10: Libby calls NBC newsman Tim Russert to complain about a colleague's news coverage. At the end of the conversation, Libby says, Russert tells him that "all the reporters know" that Wilson's wife works at the CIA. Libby says he was surprised to hear that. Russert denies saying it.
_July 11: Fleischer, on a presidential trip to Africa, tells two reporters that Wilson's wife works for the CIA. Rove tells Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper that Wilson's wife works for the CIA.
_July 12: Libby speaks to Cooper and confirms to him that he has heard that Wilson's wife was involved in sending Wilson on the trip. Libby also speaks to Miller and discusses Wilson's wife and says that she works at the CIA. Libby claims he told Cooper and Miller he only knew about Plame from talking to other reporters.
So Libby's has "faulty memory" but is still adamant that Russert, Miller, AND Ari Fleischer are wrong. And it just so happens that his faulty memory only kicks in on the points where he might be facing criminal charges. And if you do happen to buy their version of events it means that, in this time of a "clash of civilizations" and a "war on terror", the White House is entrusting classified CIA information to a guy with memory problems who talks to reporters.
joe | July 3, 2007, 3:11pm | #
John | July 27, 2005, 6:59pm | #
Xboy,
Call her what you want, but she was not a working agent and it was highly unlikely to ever be one again. Just because you work for the CIA, doesn't mean you are some secret squirel. The CIA needs bureaucrats too.
John | February 2, 2007, 11:09am | #
Scooter lied to conceal the fact that he had revealed the identity of a covert CIA agent (a felony)
That is just bullshit. She wasn't a covert agent, she was a soccer mom in Virginia who once was a covert agent.
John | February 2, 2007, 1:43pm | #
"Outing a CIA desk jockey is really sort of like outing my son as an elementary school student."
That pretty much sums it up. She was a mom with young twins. She wasn't going to go out and play James Bond anymore if she ever did.
John | July 12, 2005, 12:25pm | #
The fact is that the law in question might as well have been called the Stop Phillip Agee Act. As pointed out by several poster's above the standard of proof for it makes it virtually impossible to prove in court, unless you have a defendent like Phillip Agee who openly admits that his intent is to out as many covert agents as possible. Even if you could prove it, Pflame was a mother of two or three young children and hadn't been in out in the field in years and was unlikely ever to go in the field again. The media makes it sound like she was living undercover in Upper Bannanastan and had to flee by mule train to avoid being shot. Nothing could be further from the truth. She was a soccer mom and CIA bureaucrat at Langly who had good enough political connections in the organization to get her hack husband a quick assignment.
Jon H | July 3, 2007, 11:14pm | #
FatDrunkAndStupid wrote: "Basically, some dude wrote an op-ed bashing the administration, and the administration responded by questioning his credibility."
No, they responded by recklessly outing a CIA agent working on WMD, supposedly a matter of some importance while we're at war. In doing so, they also identified her employer of public record as a CIA front, potentially exposing anyone else using the same front company.
Further, they caused this damage to national security in a fit of
personal pique, not because there was some good reason for it.
They'd already gotten their war. Wilson's article wasn't going to change
anything. It would just make Dick Cheney look bad. So what was the big need to burn Plame?
Do you honestly think it's okay to recklessly burn a CIA agent working on WMD because you don't like what her husband wrote? The bar is
that low?
Cheney can't even sue for it in our rabidly litigious society, but he can trash a valuable intelligence asset because he can't defend himself on the merits?
(And really, Cheney and the GOP are the
last people who should be accusing anyone of nepotism, given how inbred the Bush administration's org charts are.)
How about if a deployed soldier's wife published an editorial against Bush. Would it be okay for Cheney to reveal her husband's unit's location and movements in Iraq, putting them at risk, just to get back at her?
