Will Bush Pardon Libby, and If So When? Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

When Ford pardoned Nixon, many speculated that Ford did so out of some quid pro quo deal with Nixon. It is possible that some such deal existed, though Ford denied it. Ford claimed that he pardoned Nixon for the simple reason that he needed to get Watergate out of his metaphorical (and, probably, literal) in-box in the Oval Office to allow other items to enter that in-box. A highly plausible claim to me as I sit at my desk looking at my own physical in-box.

Had Bush not commuted the incarceration element of Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence, Bush would not have faced the same in-box nightmare that Ford faced in his near-constant meetings regarding Watergate and Nixon. Both Libby's staunchest supporters and his fiercest antagonists would agree: the Libby matter is not the biggest item in Bush's in-box. At 26% approval according to recent polls, Bush cannot realistically fear a drop in public support from the Libby matter or the partial commutation of sentence. It's hard to imagine Bush becoming less popular; even explosive diarrhea can count on 24% public support.

Bush extended the partial commutation to Libby because Bush needs to reward loyalty in front of other button-men and because needs Libby to have two motivations to remain silent. The first comes from the convenience of avoiding actual testimony through the preservation of a contingent penal interest that keeps the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination applicable. Libby cannot be retried for these offenses under double jeopardy but he remains under the "single" jeopardy of this case so long as the courts have both probationary and appellate jurisdiction over him. Libby's non-commuted sentence of probation means that his circumstances could worsen through a probation violation or, hypothetically, a new trial after appeal with a nastier potential fine or a period of incarceration which George Bush has not commuted. Unlike a pardon, the commutation works only for the sentence actually imposed; a new commutation would be required for any future hypothetical sentence, so Libby can theoretically "see jail" if a Democrat gets elected and sworn in as President before appeal, new trial and disposition in the intervening 550-odd days until January 20, 2009. Libby's sentence can also improve if the appellate courts throw out the case for some reason. Either way, "single" jeopardy is not exhausted for Libby so his right against self-incrimination attaches; Libby will be delighted to exercise it, one can be certain.

The second motivator for Libby to remain silent is that the big "goodie" of a full pardon remains open to him if he plays ball until Bush (or a friendly successor) is out of office. If a Democrat is elected, Bush will probably pardon Libby 20 minutes before attending his successor's inauguration, as Mr. X essentially urged in another recent post, unless Libby completely beats the government before then on appeal, rendering the pardon moot. Bush will do this because Libby's motivation to remain silent will be damaged if Bush doesn't play ball. Convicted felons have a hard time travelling internationally or practicing law and Libby would like to see the world and practice law once he is done with this mess, most likely, though what effect a pardoned crime might have on Libby's law licenses is unclear. Libby's right against self-incrimination won't last forever; better to shorten it slightly through a pardon than risk Libby being pissed at Team Bush's monumental ingratitude. If a Republican is elected, I could see the pardon being held off until the latest practical date, ideally 18 months into the new Republican's term, so as to keep Libby "out of play" by Congress which, by then, might be in different political hands or might be focusing on other issues than those that deep-sea Plameologists find fascinating.

An Open Letter to Talking Points Memo re Joe Willson Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, July 3, 2007:

And with that knowledge, I have to say that the claim that Wilson's charges have been discredited, disproved or even meaningfully challenged is simply false. What he said on day one is all true. It's really as simple as that.

Click Here or at Permalink to Read More...

There's a tendency, even among too many people of good faith and good politics, to shy away from asserting and admitting this simple fact because Wilson has either gone on too many TV shows or preened too much in some photo shoot. But that is disreputable and shameful. The entire record of this story has been under a systematic, unfettered and, sadly, largely unresisted attack from the right for four years. Key facts have been buried under an avalanche of misinformation. The then-chairman of the senate intelligence committee made his committee an appendage of the White House and himself the president's bawd and issued a report built on intentional falsehood and misdirection.

No one is perfect. The key dividing line is who's telling the truth and who's lying. Wilson is on the former side, his critics the latter. Everything else is triviality.

Dear TPM:

I respect Josh Marshall, recalling him fairly well from Princeton 15-odd years ago. Marshall has basic credibility with me, in that I have never seen a factual claim made by Marshall (or his staffers) proven false without an admission of that by Marshall. To my knowledge, not once. An 850 credit rating with me.

But Josh, in this post you have put your credibility on the line by calling out as liars those who have accused Wilson of being a liar. You have not stated that those claimants are mistaken, or that they are taking an overly aggressive read on ambiguous facts, or have made logical errors or communicated poorly. You have accused them of deceiving the public and the press with specific intent about Wilson's state of mind and accuracy in his initial statements, i.e the "strong" thesis.

As back-up, you claim yourself as an expert and, essentially, argue from your own authority only – you know that they are liars because you are the expert, therefore we are damn fools if we think otherwise. No links to your primary "ur-posts" in TPM on this topic, no itemization of FireDogLake's take down, etc. Now I believe that you ARE an expert, that you ARE right, that Wilson WAS right and that many of Wilson's accusers ARE liars and all are wrong. But I am a civil libertarian who hates George Bush and Cheney and their right-wing horde of orcs already, so that's not much of an act of faith to ask of me. That's belief, not knowledge on my part. Those who don't have my own liberal anti-Bush bias and my ancient acquaintance with Josh Marshall have no reason to be persuaded.

Just as not every decent soul in 1973 needed to be a hard-core Watergate conspiracy theorist, not everyone needs to be a deep-sea Plameologist. The finer points of the Plame/Wilson/Libby saga have not been my hobby. But if you take a very strong thesis accusing others of being liars, you must bring the back-up with you to retain your own credibility. Otherwise, it looks like irrational and irresponsible exuberance in defense of your admitted "friend" Joe.

Respectfully,


Bruce Godfrey

The Libby Commutation Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

I have little to say about it except that I expected it. Libby was a button-man for the family boss Cheney, and Bush as titular head of the family had to take care of his button-man, both to keep him quiet and to forestall rebellion from other button-men. Part of the reason for the popularity of The Sopranos came from the fact that the daily news made the plot line seem more real; if Mafia methods work in the White House (omerta, torture, cover stories, bu&&&&&&ing the police, destroying records of communications, corrupt hiring practices, elimination of dissenting voices, even petty theft by high-up button men like morals expert and judicial nominee Claude Allen), surely they can work in suburban Montclair, New Jersey, not just Brooklyn.

The difference, of course, is that on The Sopranos, sometimes people went to jail and came out to a "release from jail party." But Bush had the power to stop a key button-man of President Cheney from going to jail. So he did it, blaming the judge for imposing an "excessive" (i.e. within the guidelines) sentence. Of course, Bush commuted the whole sentence, not just the excess part; cannot have a button-man wearing orange clothes in the Florida Panhandle.

If Bush were decent, he would tell the other button-men to buy Libby a week in Las Vegas, maybe take in a show, a little blackjack, maybe a lap dance or two.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall notes at TPM that with a commutation rather than a pardon, Libby remains under at least theoretical criminal "jeopardy" and can therefore exercise his 5th Amendment self-incrimination privilege. Shrewd.

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake on U.S. v. Libby Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com, February 21, 2007:

1. The administration lied us into war and tried to abuse its power to punish the whistleblower who told the American public the truth.

2. Scooter is the firewall to Shooter.

3. Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and other members of the administration conspired to keep federal investigators from uncovering their crimes.

4. The media was complicit in spreading administration propaganda rather than doing investigative journalism, and are now helping to set the table for a pardon.

5. The journalistic standards that have been exposed in the case (witness Tim Russert, Judy Miller, Andrea Mitchell, Robert Novak and others) are reprehensible, and have undermined the public trust in the media.

6. The degree to which this story about the lies that lead to war has been ignored by the media (relative to the feeding frenzy over [the Clinton/Lewinsky sexual scandal]) left a huge opening that the blogs have filled.

Of the paragraphs above, it is paragraph 6 that I find most to be both most clearly true and of longest reach. A lot of left bloggers ranging from the beige, staid TalkingPointsMemo.com to the wild and vulgar Jane Hamsher and the less vulgar Marcy Wheeler FireDogLake.com to community centers like DailyKos and its varied progeny to (to a lesser extent) Democratic strategy sites like MyDD.com have gotten a lot of their fuel and developed a lot of their talent out of the Wilson/Plame/Libby saga, and it is fair to say that this story and its galvanizing effect on the left blogosphere have provided the margin of victory in left netroots development.

Without Plameology, it is likely that the YearlyKos convention would not have happened last year (sidenote: Crablaw is 50-50 likely to attend YearlyKos 2007 in Chicago). For all the talk of the mainstream media being a liberal bastion, it seems to me that the press has bent over backwards to give Bush the benefit of the doubt. I think it's not a left-right issue so much as an insiders' club issue. I have come to perceive more and more while working in DC the strange, clubby environment of Potomac Fever. Georgetown is a university, a 10-block watering hole - AND a remarkably cheerful, extremely expensive and chummy neighborhood where everybody seems to know each other and neighbors become friends with remarkable easy, according to report after report. The neighborhood has subdivisions - the newspaper people live here, the senior lobbyists tend to live on that side of M Street. Alexandria has its own, strange clubby social network. So do McLean and the tonier neighborhoods in Arlington, where single family houses easily top $1 million dollars, more if within 6 blocks of a Metro station. Chevy Chase as well, for even more money.

What DC does not have is a lot of middle-class neighborhoods near the city. A few middle-class strongholds do exist in Northeast near Catholic University and near Eastern Avene in Deanwood. A very substantial majority-black middle-class lives in Prince George's County, but that County is perhaps 1/5 of the metropolitan area and even it has its very wealthy neighborhoods and some substantial poverty, though less than is commonly perceived. But in some cities, middle-class and lower-middle-class life dominate. In Baltimore, that's the case. Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Brooklyn and Queens - you see this. In DC, the concentration of wealth and power is absolutely staggering, especially when you realize that DC is less "showy" than cities like Los Angeles, i.e. the wealth is compiled beneath quiet, tasteful style. A multi-millionaire lobbyist for, say, the pharmaceutical industry is not likely to drive a sports car down K Street; a millionaire Hollywood agent doing similar work for similar money is more likely to show off his wealth.

In this clubbish, genteel Alice-in-Wonderland world a certain psychology sets in. It's not that the politicians get out of touch so much that much of this federal city comes to regard itself as a republic apart. They don't have a voting member in Congress, but who cares; they live down the street from 13 Congressmen so who needs a representative? The traditional news media, the lobbyists, the upper end of the non-profit sector, the upper-level government staffers just below secretary level, the salaried DNC and RNC apparatchiks, Congressmen, Senators and all of their major funders, connectors, contact brokers - they are of a social class and club. The USA?? - why would they want to go traveling in some foreign country like Baltimore or Cleveland?

To understand this world, listen to George Will and Cokie Roberts, read their books and ask yourself who they drink with, and who those people drink with. Then add in David Broder's Rolodex. You get the idea?

So of course it's reasonable to expect that if Vice-President Cheney and Scooter Libby dropped the dime on Valerie Plame to slap and humiliate her and her husband, or lied about hearing it from Russert first, or whatever, the entire Washington culture is likely to take care of this matter as an in-house issue. Not something to be handled by some sawed-off arrogant former mob prosecutor from Chicago. Special U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is not part of their world. Neither are the vulgar, keyboard-punching activists with strange names like "Emptywheel" and "Atrios" and "Majikthise." The contempt dripping from George Will and Cokie Roberts in their various discussions of the blogosphere as a concept - not for specific things said or done by specific bloggers, but its very existence as a hated, hostile phenomenon - is amazing, and deserves a full post in its own right. They have their culture, and they handle things their way. The U.S. Code and the FBI be damned; if the Washington insiders do it, then it is not illegal.

If Libby is convicted, I think the effect on Washington's chummy political culture will be devastating, perhaps far more devastating than it will be for Dick Cheney and President Bush. And bi-partisan long knives will come out for the dirty hippie bloggers like never before. THAT will be the longer legacy of Jane Hamsher and Marcy Wheeler's Plameology blogging.