This is what the tens of thousands of dollars raised by the Scooter Libby Defense Fund buys you: A Cybercast News Service editorial encouraging George W. Bush to pardon Lewis Libby “today. He should sign whatever paper he has to sign and stop this foolishness.”
We all know that the administration has one crystal clear motive to pardon Libby. It will avoid a six-week trial that will rehash the campaign to convince the world that Saddam Hussein (recently hanged, but not decapitated) had weapons of mass destruction and intended to give them to terrorists sworn to the destruction of his own regime. But is there any legitimate argument for pardoning Libby. The CNS editorial makes a valiant effort to find some rationale.
It starts with the obvious. This case started with an editorial by Robert Novak that revealed that Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative working on weapons of mass destruction. Novak cited two ‘senior administration officials’. We now know that those two officials were Richard Armitage and Karl Rove…not Scooter Libby. So, is this a defense?
Legally, no, it is not a defense. Libby is charged with lying to investigators and obstructing justice. The facts already in the public domain establish his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. He should, of course, be allowed to wage a vigorous defense, but he lied. He obstructed the investigation. This is essentially the same crime that Clinton stood accused of in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Do we need to pull up all the old quotes the right threw out about the importance of the rule of law?
On the other hand, most of the left argued that Bill Clinton should be given a pass. After all, the whole case was built on Paula Jones’ civil suit. That suit was thrown out. The whole thing was a witchhunt from the beginning. Clinton had been entrapped into his misleading testimony. He was the President, not some staffer. You remember the arguments.
Libby’s defenders are making a similar argument. They accuse Fitzgerald of letting Armitage off the hook and pursuing a groundless case against Libby and Rove.
It turns out that as early as 2003, Fitzgerald knew who [Armitage] had leaked the name but asked the leaker not to tell anyone he was the leaker so he could indict someone in the leak case who was not the leaker?
Perhaps nothing in the Libby trial will be more interesting than the testimony of Richard Armitage. We will learn why he told Woodward and Novak about Valerie Wilson’s employment and, also, why he was not indicted for it. But one thing is certain. When the FBI came knocking, Armitage told the truth and Libby lied. Fitzgerald came on the case later and he quickly discovered that Libby had lied to the FBI. He needed to find out why. It took him two more years to figure it out.
Is it okay, now, to give a federal prosecutor the run around? Would you lie to the FBI if you had nothing to hide?
There is a high-level of hypocrisy surrounding the defenders of Scooter Libby, but we need to take this analysis one step further. Libby’s job, at least part of it, was to protect the Vice-President. Perhaps it is unfair to send him to jail for doing his job. That determination partially depends on the actions of the Vice-President. Oliver North gained a lot of sympathy by arguing that he was merely carrying out the will of the President and that the President’s decision to defy Congress and arm the Contras was the wiser course. In a sense, North’s defense was that Reagan’s crime was an act of patriotism and therefore his complicity in the crime was also an act of patriotism.
There might be no legal basis for such sentiments but they can inform our sense of justice. Does Libby really deserve to go to jail or was he serving our broader national interests. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me call to the stand the situation on the ground in Iraq. No WMD, no connections to 9/11, and total unmitigated chaos and disaster. There should be no sentimentality about the overarching aims of Cheney’s policies that Libby was seeking to protect. If anything, it is precisely the disastrous outcome of Iraq that demands Scooter Libby receive no pardon and that he do hard time for his crimes.
To this I would add the damage done to the CIA by the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity, the harm done to the Wilsons, the money and time wasted overcoming the obstuction of the investigation, and the fact that Libby has not even filed an appeal for a pardon with the Department of Justice.
Libby should not be pardoned.
