Plamegate

[Sonic Youth]

And you know what? Better he did this now than waste our tax money fighting over appeals when the end result was going to be the same anyway.

Obviously this was going to happen when Libby was denied bail, so there's really no point in getting upset.

[Sonic Youth]

Bush spares Libby from prison


BREAKING NEWS

Updated: 6 minutes ago
MSNBC.com

WASHINGTON - President Bush commuted the sentence of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on Monday, sparing him from a 2½-year prison term that Bush said was excessive.

Bush’s move came hours after a federal appeals panel ruled Libby could not delay his prison term in the CIA leak case. That meant Libby was likely to have to report to prison soon and put new pressure on the president, who had been sidestepping calls by Libby’s allies to pardon the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

“I respect the jury’s verdict,” Bush said in a statement. “But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.”

[criddic3]

Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places—including his boss Dick Cheney—outed a covert CIA agent.

This is a lie. According to most accounts, Fitzgerald likely knew the real source of the leak early on but decided to keep on digging anyway, which led to Libby's indictment. Libby, even Fitzgerald said, was NOT the source of the leak.

[Damien]

From Bill Moyers's Journal

BEGGING HIS PARDON
by Bill Moyers

We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington's ruling clique of neoconservative elites—the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.

It is well known that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby—once Vice President Cheney’s most trusted adviser—has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie. Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice.

Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places—including his boss Dick Cheney—outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand in the eyes of truth. "Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered,” wrote the chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton—a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush—called the evidence “overwhelming” and threw the book at Libby.

You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge's chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to “free Scooter.”

Vice President Cheney issued a statement praising Libby as “a man…of personal integrity”—without even a hint of irony about their collusion to browbeat the CIA into mangling intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the invasion.

“A patriot, a dedicated public servant, a strong family man, and a tireless, honorable, selfless human being,” said Donald Rumsfeld—the very same Rumsfeld who had claimed to know the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction and who boasted of “bulletproof” evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. “A good person” and “decent man,” said the one-time Pentagon adviser Kenneth Adelman, who had predicted the war in Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” Paul Wolfowitz wrote a four-page letter to praise “the noblest spirit of selfless service” that he knew motivated his friend Scooter. Yes, that Paul Wolfowitz, who had claimed Iraqis would “greet us as liberators” and that Iraq would “finance its own reconstruction.” The same Paul Wolfowitz who had to resign recently as president of the World Bank for using his office to show favoritism to his girlfriend. Paul Wolfowitz turned character witness.

The praise kept coming: from Douglas Feith, who ran the Pentagon factory of disinformation that Cheney and Libby used to brainwash the press; from Richard Perle, as cocksure about Libby’s “honesty, integrity, fairness and balance” as he had been about the success of the war; and from William Kristol, who had primed the pump of the propaganda machine at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and has led the call for a Presidential pardon. “The case was such a farce, in my view,” he said. “I’m for pardon on the merits.”

One beltway insider reports that the entire community is grieving—“weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness” of Libby's sentence.

And there’s the rub.

None seem the least weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness of sentencing soldiers to repeated and longer tours of duty in a war induced by deception. It was left to the hawkish academic Fouad Ajami to state the matter baldly. In a piece published on the editorial page of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Ajami pleaded with Bush to pardon Libby. For believing “in the nobility of this war,” wrote Ajami, Scooter Libby had himself become a “casualty”—a fallen soldier the President dare not leave behind on the Beltway battlefield.

Not a word in the entire article about the real fallen soldiers. The honest-to-God dead, and dying, and wounded. Not a word about the chaos or the cost. Even as the calamity they created worsens, all they can muster is a cry for leniency for one of their own who lied to cover their tracks.

There are contrarian voices: “This is an open and shut case of perjury and obstruction of justice,” said Pat Buchanan. “The Republican Party stands for the idea that high officials should not be lying to special investigators.” From the former Governor of Virginia, James Gilmore, a staunch conservative, comes this verdict: “If the public believes there’s one law for a certain group of people in high places and another law for regular people, then you will destroy the law and destroy the system.”

So it may well be, as THE HARTFORD COURANT said editorially, that Mr Libby is “a nice guy, a loyal and devoted patriot…but none of that excuses perjury or obstruction of justice. If it did, truth wouldn’t matter much.”

[Damien]

SCOOTER'S SOPRANOS GO TO THE MATTRESSES
By FRANK RICH
June 17, 2007

AS a weary nation awaited the fade-out of "The Sopranos" last Sunday, the widow of the actual Mafia don John Gotti visited his tomb in Queens to observe the fifth anniversary of his death. Victoria Gotti was not pleased to find reporters lying in wait.

"It's disgusting that people are still obsessed with Gotti and the mob," she told The Daily News. "They should be obsessed with that mob in Washington. They have 3,000 deaths on their hands." She demanded to know if the president and vice president have relatives on the front lines. "Every time I watch the news and I hear of another death," she said, "it sickens me."

Far be it from me to cross any member of the Gotti family, but there's nothing wrong with being obsessed with both mobs. Now that the approval rating for the entire Washington franchise, the president and Congress alike, has plummeted into the 20s, we need any distraction we can get; the Mafia is a welcome nostalgic escape from a gridlocked government at home and epic violence abroad.

But unlikely moral arbiter that Mrs. Gotti may be, she does have a point. As the Iraq war careens toward a denouement as black, unresolved and terrifying as David Chase's inspired "Sopranos" finale, the mob in the capital deserves at least equal attention. John Gotti, the last don, is dead. Mr. Chase's series is over. But the deaths on the nightly news are coming as fast as ever.

True, the Washington mob isn't as sexy as the Gotti or Soprano clans, but there is now a gripping nonfiction dramatization of its machinations available gratis on the Internet, no HBO subscription required. For this we can thank U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who presided over the Scooter Libby trial. Judge Walton's greatest move was not the 30-month sentence he gave Mr. Libby, a fall guy for higher-ups (and certain to be pardoned to protect their secrets). It was instead the judge's decision to make public the testimonials written to the court by members of the Washington establishment pleading that a criminal convicted on four felony counts be set free.

Mr. Libby's lawyers argued that these letters should remain locked away on the hilarious grounds that they might be "discussed, even mocked, by bloggers." And apparently many of the correspondents assumed that their missives would remain private, just like all other documents pertaining to Mr. Libby's former boss, Dick Cheney. The result is very little self-censorship among the authors and an epistolary gold mine for readers.

Among those contributing to the 373 pages of what thesmokinggun.com calls "Scooter Libby Love Letters" are self-identified liberals and Democrats, a few journalists (including a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine) and a goodly sample of those who presided over the Iraq catastrophe or cheered it on. This is a documentary snapshot of the elite Washington mob of our time.

Like the scripts for "The Sopranos," the letters are not without mordant laughs. Henry Kissinger writes a perfunctory two paragraphs, of which the one about Mr. Libby rather than himself seems an afterthought. James Carville co-signs a letter by Mary Matalin tediously detailing Mr. Libby's devotion to organizing trick-or-treat festivities for administration children spending a post-9/11 Halloween at an "undisclosed location." One correspondent writes in astonishment that Mr. Libby once helped "a neighbor who is a staunch Democrat" dig his car out of the snow, and another is in awe that Mr. Libby would "personally buy his son a gift rather than passing the task on to his wife." Many praise Mr. Libby's novel, "The Apprentice," apparently on the principle that an overwritten slab of published fiction might legitimize the short stories he fabricated freelance for a grand jury.

But what makes these letters rise above inanity is the portrait they provide of a wartime capital cut adrift from moral bearings. As the political historian Rick Perlstein has written, one of the recurrent themes of these pleas for mercy is that Mr. Libby perjured himself "only because he was so busy protecting us from Armageddon." Has there ever been a government leader convicted of a crime — and I don't mean only Americans — who didn't see himself as saving the world from the enemy?

The Libby supporters never acknowledge the undisputed fact that their hero, a lawyer by profession, leaked classified information about a covert C.I.A. officer. And that he did so not accidentally but to try to silence an administration critic who called attention to the White House's prewar lies about W.M.D. intelligence. And that he compounded the original lies by lying repeatedly to investigators pursuing an inquiry that without his interference might have nailed others now known to have also leaked Valerie Wilson's identity (Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer).

Much has been said about the hypocrisy of those on the right, champions both of Bill Clinton's impeachment and of unflinching immigration enforcement, who call for legal amnesty in Mr. Libby's case. To thicken their exquisite bind, these selective sticklers for strict justice have been foiled in their usual drill of attacking the judge in the case as "liberal." Judge Walton was initially appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan and was elevated to his present job by the current President Bush; he was assigned as well to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by the Bush-appointed chief justice, John Roberts. Such credentials notwithstanding, Judge Walton told the court on Thursday that he was alarmed by new correspondence and phone calls from the Libby mob since the sentencing "wishing bad things" on him and his family.

In Washington, however, hypocrisy is a perennial crime in both parties; if all the city's hypocrites were put in jail, there would be no one left to run the government. What is more striking about the Libby love letters is how nearly all of them ignore the reality that the crime of lying under oath is at the heart of the case. That issue simply isn't on these letter writers' radar screen; the criminal act of perjury isn't addressed (unless it's ascribed to memory loss because Mr. Libby was so darn busy saving the world). Given that Mr. Libby expressed no contrition in court after being convicted, you'd think some of his defenders might step into that moral vacuum to speak for him. But there's been so much lying surrounding this war from the start that everyone is inured to it by now. In Washington, lying no longer registers as an offense against the rule of law.

Instead the letter writers repeat tirelessly that Mr. Libby is a victim, suffering "permanent damage" to his reputation, family and career in the typical judgment of Kenneth Adelman, the foreign-policy thinker who predicted a "cakewalk" for America in Iraq. There's a whole lot of projection going on, because to judge from these letters, those who drummed up this war think of themselves as victims too. In his letter, the disgraced Paul Wolfowitz sees his friend's case as an excuse to deflect his own culpability for the fiasco. He writes that "during the spring and summer of 2003, when some others were envisioning a prolonged American occupation," Mr. Libby "was a strong advocate for a more rapid build-up of the Iraqi Army and a more rapid transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis, points on which history will prove him to have been prescient."

History will prove no such thing; a "rapid" buildup of the Iraqi Army was and is a mirage, and the neocons' chosen leader for an instant sovereign Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, had no political following. But Mr. Wolfowitz's real point is to pin his own catastrophic blundering on L. Paul Bremer, the neocons' chosen scapegoat for a policy that was doomed with or without Mr. Bremer's incompetent execution of the American occupation.

Of all the Libby worshipers, the one most mocked in the blogosphere and beyond is Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-American academic and war proponent who fantasized that a liberated Iraq would have a (positive) "contagion effect" on the region and that Americans would be greeted "in Baghdad and Basra with kites and boom boxes." (I guess it all depends on your definition of "boom boxes.") In an open letter to President Bush for The Wall Street Journal op-ed page on June 8, he embroidered his initial letter to Judge Walton, likening Mr. Libby to a "fallen soldier" in the Iraq war. In Mr. Ajami's view, Tim Russert (whose testimony contradicted Mr. Libby's) and the American system of justice are untrustworthy, and "the 'covertness' of Mrs. Wilson was never convincingly and fully established." (The C.I.A. confirmed her covert status in court documents filed in May.)

Mr. Ajami notes, accurately, that the trial was "about the Iraq war and its legitimacy" — an argument that could also be mustered by defenders of Alger Hiss who felt his perjury trial was about the cold war. But it's even more revealing that the only "casualty of a war" Mr. Ajami's conscience prompts him to mention is Mr. Libby, a figurative casualty rather than a literal one.

No wonder Victoria Gotti denigrated "that mob in Washington." When the godfathers of this war speak of never leaving "a fallen comrade" on the battlefield in Iraq, as Mr. Ajami writes of Mr. Libby, they are speaking first and foremost of one another. The soldiers still making the ultimate sacrifice for this gang's hubristic folly will just have to fend for themselves.

[Sonic Youth]

Judge orders Libby jailed during appeal


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A federal judge on Thursday ordered I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to report to prison while his attorneys appeal his perjury and obstruction convictions.

Libby's attorneys asked that the order be stayed, but U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton denied that and told Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff that he had 10 days to appeal the ruling.

Libby was sentenced to 2½ years in prison for lying and obstructing the investigation into who revealed in 2003 that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA operative. He also was fined $250,000.

At the beginning of Thursday morning's hearing, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton told the court he had received "harassing" and "hateful" messages.

"In the interest of full disclosure, I have received a number of harassing, angry and mean-spirited phone calls and messages. Some wishing bad things on me and my family," the judge said. "Those types of things will have no impact."

"I initially threw them away, but then there were more, some that were more hateful," Walton said. "They are being kept."

Libby was found guilty of lying to investigators about what he told reporters about Valerie Plame Wilson, whose identity as a CIA operative was leaked to the media in 2003.

Plame Wilson's name became public when Robert Novak named her in his column on July 14, 2003. Her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had openly questioned the Bush administration's basis for invading Iraq.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has admitted he disclosed the information to a reporter. Novak pointed to another "senior administration official" -- Bush political adviser Karl Rove -- as the second source for his column.

No one has been charged with leaking classified information in the case, but a jury found Libby guilty of trying to deceive investigators and a grand jury as to what went on.

He was the only person charged in the case, and was the first sitting White House official to be indicted in 130 years. Libby has maintained his innocence ever since he was indicted and resigned in October 2005.

After the June 5 sentencing, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said he was inclined to jail Libby after the defense laid out its proposed appeal, but the judge told attorneys he was open to changing his mind.

Defense lawyers plan to challenge the convictions based on Walton's having excluded a memory expert's testimony at trial. They also claim that the special counsel did not have proper authority.

Walton responded that without enough to successfully challenge the convictions, he is precluded from allowing a defendant to remain free. If he moves ahead to jail Libby, that decision itself can be appealed.

In the time since sentencing, a group of prominent legal scholars has filed a friend-of-the court brief, setting out why they believe Libby's appeal will have merit.

The amicus brief supports the position taken by Libby's defense team that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney based in Chicago, Illinois, was not properly installed as special counsel to investigate what became known as the CIA leak case.

Citing the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the legal scholars back Libby's defense claim that Fitzgerald was "too independent" and did not have a superior who could be held "politically accountable for his actions."

As such, they believe there is a close question for an Appeals Court to consider about the authority for Fitzgerald's work and therefore the Libby indictment.

The 12 scholars, including two of the most reprehensible people who ever lived, onetime Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, say their filing does not take a position on whether Libby should be jailed pending appeal, only that his appeal presents a close question to be considered.*

Cheney has continued to express support and empathy for his former chief of staff, and it's possible Libby could still be granted a presidential pardon before the end of President Bush's term.


*Okay, I admit I added a little content of my own.

[Damien]

I'm not surprised he's such a failure as a husband and a father.

And a mayor.

[Sonic Youth]

That's the dumbest defense I've ever heard.

No, he is not entitled to break the rules and take up more time than the other candidates in a debate because he's a former prosecutor. Fairness is when ALL the candidates get equal time when a question is put to all of them.

If your idea of fairness is not allowing the other candidates equal time, no wonder your idea of sound foreign policy is bombing and murdering innocent women and children. The two go together in a dictatorial philosophy.

I'm not surprised he's such a failure as a husband and a father.

[criddic3]

To be fair, though, this was a strange question to turn into a "yes" or "no." He's a former prosecutor and is entitled to showcase his experience.

[Sonic Youth]

MR. BLITZER: I’m trying to get a yes or no. (Laughter.)

Wow, Giuliani is unable to control himself, isn't he? (I'm sure Donna Hanover would agree.)

I sure don't want another president who thinks he's above the established rules. No wonder his children despise him.

[criddic3]

MR. BLITZER: All right. Thank you, Congressman.

I just want to do a quick yes or no, and I’m going to go down the rest of the group and let everybody just tell me yes or no, would you pardon Scooter Libby?

REP. PAUL: No.

MR. GILMORE: No. I’m steeped in the law. I wouldn’t do that.

REP. HUNTER: No, not without reading the transcript.

MR. HUCKABEE: Not without reading the transcript.

SEN. MCCAIN: He’s going through an appeal process. We’ve got to see what happens here.

MR. GIULIANI: I think the sentence was way out of line. I mean, the sentence was grossly excessive in a situation in which at the beginning, the prosecutor knew who the leak was —

MR. BLITZER: So yes or no, would you pardon him?

MR. GIULIANI: — and he knew a crime wasn’t committed. I recommended over a thousand pardons to President Reagan when I was associate attorney general. I would see if it fit the criteria for pardon. I’d wait for the appeal. I think what the judge did today argues more in favor of a pardon —

MR. BLITZER: Thank you.

MR. GIULIANI: — because this is excessive punishment —

MR. BLITZER: All right.

MR. GIULIANI: — when you consider — I’ve prosecuted 5,000 cases —

MR. BLITZER: I’m trying to get a yes or no. (Laughter.)

MR. GIULIANI: Well, this is a very important issue. This is a very, very important — a man’s life is at stake. And the reality is, this is an incomprehensible situation. They knew who the leak was —

MR. : Say, Wolf, can I explain — (off mike) —

MR. GIULIANI: — and ultimately, there was no underlying crime involved.

MR. BLITZER: All right.

MR. ROMNEY: This is one of those situations where I go back to my record as governor. I didn’t pardon anybody as governor because I didn’t want to overturn a jury.

But in this case, you have a prosecutor who clearly abused prosecutorial discretion by going after somebody when he already knew that the source of the leak was Richard Armitage. He’d been told that. So HE went on a political vendetta.

MR. BLITZER: So is that a yes?

MR. ROMNEY: It’s worth looking at that. I will study it very closely, if I’m lucky enough to be president, and I’d keep that option open.

MR. BLITZER: Senator?

SEN. BROWNBACK: Yes. The basic crime here didn’t happen.

MR. BLITZER: All right.

SEN. BROWNBACK: What they were saying was that the identity of an agent was revealed —

MR. BLITZER: Governor?

SEN. BROWNBACK: — but that agent has to be in the field for that to be a crime. That didn’t occur.

MR. BLITZER: Governor?

MR. THOMPSON: Bill Clinton committed perjury in a grand jury — lost his law license. Scooter Libby got 30 months. To me, it’s not fair at all. But I would make sure the appeal was done properly, and then I would examine the record.

MR. BLITZER: Congressman?

REP. TANCREDO: Yes.

MR. BLITZER: Yes.

All right. We heard from all of them. (Applause.)

-- from CNN transcript of Republican debate.

[Damien]

No one has been directly prosecuted for the actual act of leaking the information that was the purpose of the investigation to begin with.

You do realize that when people with key knowledge tell lies, it tends to get in the way of uncovering the truth in criminal trials (which can impede bringing charges for the underlying matter)?

Go to a dictionary, look up the definition of "cover-up".

Tee, this is apparently the official right-wing line regarding Scooter for there was a letter in the Times today that closely matched criddic's post. And some guy from National Review was on Hardball citing Sandy Berger, so clearly his name was in the Republican talking points memo.

criddic, Berger's documents had nothing to do with White Water/travelgate/Monica Lewinsky.

[criddic3]

And the whole white water/travelgate/Monica Lewinsky series of events weren't fishing expeditions? I'm sure glad to see the Republicans have the ability to tell the difference.

You're absolutely right. They were fishing expeditions, but there were more than enough clues to suggest something majorly wrong was being done. The fact that Sandy Berger was convicted of stealing documents and destroying them tells us as much.

The thing that eventually caught Clinton was his lying to a grand jury about his actions.

As I said before, if Libby obstructed the investigation then he deserves some punishment (though he isn't guilty of any direct link to the case, as Fitzgerald actually stated).

[Mister Tee]

No one has been directly prosecuted for the actual act of leaking the information that was the purpose of the investigation to begin with.

You do realize that when people with key knowledge tell lies, it tends to get in the way of uncovering the truth in criminal trials (which can impede bringing charges for the underlying matter)?

Go to a dictionary, look up the definition of "cover-up".

[OscarGuy]

And the whole white water/travelgate/Monica Lewinsky series of events weren't fishing expeditions? I'm sure glad to see the Republicans have the ability to tell the difference.