July 3, 2007
News Analysis

For Bush, Action in Libby Case Was a Test of Will

What the Hell does this headline mean? A test of will with whom? With Judge Reggie Walton? With America’s system of jurisprudence? With Patrick Fitzgerald? Headline reinforces Bush’s tough guy image when he was just saving his own neck and subverting the rule of law and his own publicly stated "commitment" to getting to the "bottom" of the outing of Valerie Plame. Of course, Stolberg misses the fact, in her analysis, that Bush is at the bottom of the pile.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG WASHINGTON, July 2 — President Bush’s decision to commute the sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. was the act of a liberated man — a leader who knows that, with 18 months left in the Oval Office and only a dwindling band of conservatives still behind him, he might as well do what he wants.

Oh my God! "The act of a liberated man." Excuse us, wasn’t it the act of a desperate man who turned his back on a lifetime of supporting "law and order" to keep himself and Cheney from being further implicated in the outing of a CIA operative who specialized in the tracking of WMDs, thus being a president who compromised our national security. "A liberated man"? If Bush were at 65% percent in the polls, Stolberg would no doubt call it the act of an "empowered man."

The decision is a sharp departure for Mr. Bush. In determining whether to invoke his powers of clemency, the president typically relies on formal advice from lawyers at the Justice Department.

Maybe Stolberg is so busy brown nosing the White House, she hasn’t had a chance to keep up on ProsecutorGate. Uh, Ms. Stolberg, the White House doesn’t get advice from the DOJ, the White House runs the DOJ and gives it orders.

But the Libby case, featuring a loyal aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was the architect and chief defender of the administration’s most controversial foreign policy decision, the war in Iraq, was not just any clemency case. It came to symbolize an unpopular war and the administration’s penchant for secrecy.

Even as he publicly declined to comment on the case, Mr. Bush had privately told his aides that he believed Mr. Libby’s sentence, to 30 months in prison, was too harsh.

Can we have some names here? This implies that Bush accepted the guilty verdict, but thought the punishment was too severe, which would mean, as Joe Wilson has pointed out, that Bush believed in the verdict that Libby was guilty of obstruction of justice. And why was he obstructing justice? According to Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, it was to protect Cheney. And evidence in Libby’s trial also implicates Bush.

"I think he sincerely believed that Scooter was not shown proper justice," said Charlie Black, a Republican strategist close to the administration. "We can get into the whole definition of justice versus mercy, but the point is the president didn’t say justice wasn’t done, he just didn’t think the sentence was fair and therefore he showed mercy."

Ah, first of all, Black is not an aide to Bush. He is a long-time Republican spinmeister, who gives the Rovian spin of the day so Stolberg can have a quote. Second of all, if Bush didn’t believe Libby was shown "proper justice," doesn’t that mean that Bush thought Libby shouldn’t have been convicted? But after the CIA asked the DOJ to investigate who outed a CIA operative, didn’t Bush promise to find out who it was and punish the person? But how could he do that when he was part of the effort to retaliate against Joe Wilson, no matter what the cost to America’s national security. And what about Rove’s complicity? Why was his security clearance just renewed? But we digress.

Mr. Bush is not a man to dole out pardons lightly, and in offering a commutation — which left Mr. Libby’s $250,000 fine intact — rather than a pardon, he chose not to use his Constitutional powers of clemency to offer Mr. Libby official forgiveness.

Here, Stolberg, buys the Rovian strategy of keeping the word "pardon" out of the headlines, but keeping Libby out of jail. The Busheviks will get Libby a job that will easily pay the fine with plenty of spare change. Who doubts that? The challenge was giving Libby enough so that he wouldn’t sing to Fitzgerald about Cheney, Bush and Rove, while making sure that "reporters" like Stolberg didn’t use the word pardon.

The decision was closely held; only a few aides knew. The commutation seemed to catch Justice Department officials, and even some of Mr. Bush’s closest aides, off guard. At the Justice Department, several senior officials were on their way out of the building shortly before 6 p.m. when news flashed on their Blackberries. They were floored.

BuzzFlash was "floored" by Stolberg claiming that DOJ senior officials were "floored." Excuse us, anyone with a pea for a brain knew something like this was coming. The only surprise was that it was not technically a complete pardon. Maybe that was what the senior DOJ officials were "floored" about.

At the White House, Tony Snow, the press secretary, said he did not know who was consulted, or how the decision reached. Asked if Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, had been advising Mr. Bush on the matter, Mr. Snow said, "My guess is Fred did, but I’m guessing with you right now."

Ah, the "I know nothing. I know nothing" excuse from the unflappable WH prevaricator and Ex-FOX propaganda news "star," Tony Snow, who normally claims to know everything.

Mr. Libby had close allies in the White House. The president’s new counselor, Ed Gillespie, who started at the White House just four days ago, played a role in Mr. Libby’s legal defense fund. Asked if he had spoken to Mr. Bush personally about Mr. Libby, he said, "I’m not going to go into any internal discussions."

At least some recognition of reality, even if it is an understatement to say the least.

One big question is what role, if any, Mr. Cheney played. Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney are extremely close — they often rode to work together before Mr. Libby’s indictment forced him to resign as Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff in October 2005 — and aides said the vice president viewed Mr. Libby’s conviction as a tragedy.

Is there any question what role Cheney had to play? All Bush had to do was turn on the television to hear Cheney whining about what a "grave injustice" had been done to Libby. Of course, considering that Cheney orchestrated the whole vendetta against Wilson, with Bush’s apparent knowledge, you would think he might get a bit concerned when his top hit man gets nailed. Ah, yes, what a "tragedy" -- the commutation that is.

Mr. Bush comes at the decision a weakened leader, with his public approval ratings at historic lows for any president, his domestic agenda faltering on Capitol Hill and his aides facing subpoenas from the Democrats who control Congress. Those circumstances offer him a certain amount of freedom; as Mr. Black said, "He knows he’s going to get hammered no matter what he does."

Ah, yes that glorious patriotic word, "freedom." You got to love the cleverness of the spin. The WH must have made up with Frank Luntz for this focus-tested language: a "liberated" Bush, enjoying his "freedom." Make that three barf bags, please!

Indeed, to administration critics, the commutation was a subversion of justice, an act of hypocrisy by a president who once vowed that anyone in his administration who broke the law would "be taken care of."

Ah, as Jon Stewart would say, finally a "Zen moment" of truth.

Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party, called it a "get-out-of-jail-free card." Representative Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, called it "a betrayal of trust of the American people."

Now, let’s finally hear it from the "other side" of the story. Ms. Stolberg, this is a question of facts, which it is your responsibility to ferret out, not two competing perspectives. Libby was convicted by a jury, sentenced by a judge whom Bush appointed, and his prison term was upheld by a Republican dominated federal appellate panel.

But to the conservative believers who make up Mr. Bush’s political base, the Libby case was a test of the president’s political will. In the end, although he did not go so far as to pardon Mr. Libby, Mr. Bush apparently decided that it was a test he did not want to fail.

Political will? Excuse us. What political will is there in standing up for someone who helped jeopardize the national security of the United States of America? This was not a test of political will. It was an issue of Bush keeping himself from being impeached and potentially being tried. The real test of political will would have been to let justice take care of itself.

"It became an issue of character and courage, really," said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who had argued in his magazine that if Mr. Bush was not going to pardon Mr. Libby, at least he should commute his sentence. "I certainly think Bush did the right thing and I think he did something important for his presidency. I think conservatives would have lost respect for Bush if he had not commuted Libby’s sentence."

Why do reporters like Stolberg keep going back to a putz like William Kristol. He’s kind of the Paris Hilton of Neo-cons. He’s famous for advocating utterly failed policies and then continuing to advocate for even more foolish ones.

Even as Mr. Libby’s defenders lobbied the White House intensely for a pardon, the deliberations were closely held. In fact, Mr. Bush only reached the decision on Monday, hours after a federal court ruled that Mr. Libby could not remain free while his case was on appeal.

How does Stolberg definitively know when Bush "reached the decision"? Is she a mind reader? What does she think, that Bush finished his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and thought, "I think today is a good day to commute Scooter Libby, then I’ll go for a bike ride." As if this contingency hasn’t been in the works for months.

The decision was announced by the White House in a formal statement, just after Mr. Bush had returned to Washington from Kennebunkport, where he spent the weekend meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. In it, Mr. Bush said he had carefully weighed the arguments of Mr. Libby’s critics and defenders.

"I respect the jury’s verdict," he said. "But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive."

Does Stolberg emphasize that it was announced in the late, late afternoon Eastern Time to try to diminish its news impact as much as possible, just before July 4, when people are off for a Holiday? No, she doesn’t. She mentions the time earlier, but not the calculated nature of the reason behind the "after the work day" announcement.

From the outset, Mr. Bush tried to keep his distance from the Libby case, which grew out of the investigation into who leaked the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson. He declined to talk about it, and until Monday had insisted that he would let the legal process run its course before considering a pardon.

Bush expressed his "concern" about the stress that the trial was causing Libby and his family, without ever expressing any concern about Plame and Wilson, or about how Plame’s outing damaged our national security.

But aides said the judge in the case, Reggie B. Walton of the Federal District Court, pushed Mr. Bush into a decision when he ordered Mr. Libby to begin serving his time — a decision upheld Monday by a three-judge panel. So, unlike predecessors, including his father, who used their powers of clemency as they were leaving office, Mr. Bush was forced to act now. He has 18 months left to absorb the political risks, and benefits, of his decision.

Excuse us. Bush was"pushed" into a decision by a law and order judge whom he had appointed? Does this make any sense? At least Stolberg attributes this perspective to unnamed aides, but it comes across as clearly serving the interests of the White House to have it in her "news analysis."

A Decision Made Largely Alone

By Michael Abramowitz Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 3, 2007; Page A01

President Bush limited his deliberations over commuting the prison term of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to a few close aides, opting not to consult with the Justice Department and rebuffing efforts by friends to lobby on Libby's behalf, administration officials and people close to Bush said yesterday.

"We were all told to stay away from it," said an old Bush friend from Texas who is close to Libby and would not speak for attribution. "When we called over there, they said the president is well aware of the situation, so don't raise it. None of us lobbied him because they told us not to.

"For the first time in his presidency, Bush commuted a sentence without running requests through lawyers at the Justice Department, White House officials said. He also did not ask the chief prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, for his input, as routinely happens in cases routed through the Justice Department's pardon attorney.

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