The Discerning Texan

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Media Bias, Patrick Fitzgerald, Plame, Travesty of Justice

Labels: Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald, Travesty of Justice

Labels: Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald, President Bush, Travesty of Justice

We said it in March, when I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby became the only person convicted of any crime in the CIA-leak investigation, and we’ll say it again now that he has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison: President Bush should pardon Libby, and do it now.

There has always been solid justification for a pardon. Although he tried mightily, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never found enough evidence to charge Libby or anyone else with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act in the CIA-leak affair. From the beginning of his investigation, Fitzgerald knew who revealed CIA employee Valerie Plame’s identity to columnist Robert Novak, and it wasn’t Libby. (That honor goes to former deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage.) The fact that there was a special prosecutor at all was more the result of bureaucratic infighting and political cowardice in the Bush administration than of any wrongdoing by Libby or the others who were investigated. And finally, the discrepancies between Libby’s grand-jury testimony and that of the journalists who contradicted him can be explained by differences in memory, and should not have resulted in perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges against Libby. Anyone who watched Libby’s trial knows it was a parade of conflicting memories, and reasonable people could disagree with the jury’s verdict.

Now, however, we have a new reason to call on President Bush to pardon Libby: Fitzgerald’s deplorable behavior in the days leading up to the sentencing. In pre-sentencing legal arguments, it became clear that Fitzgerald wanted the judge to sentence Libby, who had been found guilty of process crimes, as if he had instead been convicted of those more serious underlying allegations that formed the basis of the CIA-leak investigation. Fitzgerald ignored the fact that he had never brought charges under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act, and wrote that the grand jury “obtained substantial evidence indicating that one or both of the statutes may have been violated.” He asked Judge Reggie Walton to treat Libby as if it had been proven that such crimes occurred.

The problem was that Fitzgerald not only did not charge Libby or anyone else with those underlying crimes, he never even offered any evidence in court that those crimes, as carefully defined by the statutes involved, ever happened. His throw-the-book-at-him sentencing recommendation contradicted the conclusion reached by probation officials, who in their pre-sentencing report pointed out that “the defendant was neither charged nor convicted of any crime involving the leaking of [Valerie Plame Wilson’s] ‘covert’ status.”

Going one step farther, Fitzgerald also argued that Mrs. Wilson was, without any doubt, a covert CIA agent as defined by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. In court filings, he offered what he said was a CIA-authored summary of her job status affirming that, at the time her name was revealed by Novak, she was covert, and that the CIA was taking “affirmative measures to conceal her identity,” as required by law. But many months ago, when Libby’s defense team was begging for such information, Fitzgerald refused to provide it. He pointedly declined to call Plame “covert.” He said her job status was irrelevant to the case against Libby. He even argued that it was irrelevant whether Mrs. Wilson worked at the CIA at all. Agreeing with Fitzgerald, Judge Walton barred both sides from discussing Mrs. Wilson’s status at the trial.

But in the days before sentencing, Fitzgerald suddenly wanted to talk about Mrs. Wilson’s job. Again, Libby’s lawyers were given no chance to look into her status at the CIA. “We have never been granted an opportunity to challenge this conclusory assertion or any of the other unsubstantiated claims in this document, nor permitted to investigate how it was created,” the defense team argued. “If nothing else, the fact that the CIA’s spokesperson confirmed Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment to Mr. Novak calls into question whether the government was taking affirmative measures to conceal her identity.”

All of this might be funny if it weren’t so serious for Libby. He is a dedicated public servant caught in a crazy political fight that should have never happened, convicted of lying about a crime that the prosecutor can’t even prove was committed.

President Bush has the power to end this ridiculous saga right now. He should do so.

Labels: Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald, Travesty of Justice

... On July 6, 2003, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV charged in the New York Times that the administration had manipulated intelligence findings in order to rationalize the invasion of Iraq. He knew this, Wilson wrote in a lengthy op-ed, because he himself had been sent to Africa by the CIA a year earlier to investigate a report that Niger was supplying uranium ore to Iraq. He had come across nothing to support this allegation. Yet not only had his negative finding been ignored by the administration, but the President, in his January 2003 State of the Union address, specifically invoked the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and Niger. “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war,” Wilson summarized, “I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

A week after Wilson’s op-ed appeared, someone leaked to the press that the ambassador’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was employed by the CIA as a covert agent, and that her husband’s trip to Niger had been little more than a “junket” conducted at her behest. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), signed into law in 1982, it is a felony knowingly to divulge the identity of a covert agent (if the information was received through official channels). The disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s identity, jeopardizing her undercover work for the CIA and potentially compromising national security, might have constituted a violation of IIPA—this, in pursuit of a petty official vendetta against her husband for having dared challenge the Bush White House. In view of the seriousness of the possible offense, a government investigation ensued, leading in time to the trial of Scooter Libby.

The trouble with this narrative is that Libby was not the source of the information; nor was he ever charged with the crime of leaking it. This, however, has not appeared to trouble his accusers. As Joseph Wilson would put it after the trial, Libby’s conviction for perjury rather than for violating the IIPA was like putting Al Capone behind bars for tax evasion; when you are dealing with known criminals, the particular crime you catch them at is less important than catching them at all. Similarly, in the judgment of Max Frankel, the former executive editor of the New York Times (writing in the Sunday Times Magazine), the essential point to be gleaned from the trial is that Libby was indeed engaged in a White House campaign to expose Mrs. Wilson and discredit her husband; the fact that the information about her was first leaked through other channels was a matter only of happenstance, or perhaps incompetence.

But despite the wishes of those who take their history via synecdoche, this reading of the Libby trial is wrong on every point. Indeed, for a trial that is said to have been about the nature of truth-telling and lying, it is amazing how mistaken is the impression most people have both of the proceeding itself and of its meaning. This is the case not only for Libby’s enemies but also for his defenders, who tend to construe his fall as a tale of tragic personal sacrifice in the name of a higher cause—protecting his superiors and, through them, the continued prosecution of the war against terror. In fact, it is a tale of something else entirely.

Labels: Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald, Plame, Travesty of Justice

Labels: Democrat Sabotage, Nutroots, Patrick Fitzgerald, Plame

Labels: Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald, Plame, Travesty of Justice