The Railroading Of Scooter Libby

This just makes me sick:

Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison Tuesday for lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, stood calmly before a packed courtroom as a federal judge said the evidence overwhelmingly proved his guilt.

"People who occupy these types of positions, where they have the welfare and security of nation in their hands, have a special obligation to not do anything that might create a problem," U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said.

Whereas this actively pisses me off:

Regardless of the ludicrous nature of a three-year investigation where the perpetrator never got charged with the initial suspected crime, Libby got what he deserved, having lied to investigators and the grand jury. People cannot commit perjury to block an investigation and expect to simply walk away from it. A jury concluded that Libby did exactly that, and the sentence is commensurate with the crime.

Spoken like a man who, I would wager, has never been served with a subpeona to testify before a federal grand jury, or give a civil deposition under oath, about events several years in the past. I wouldn't have figured Admiral Ed for the Pontius Pilate type, but the way he hurls Scooter Libby under the bus here is appallingly and callously ignorant.

Where shall we begin? How about the throw-away "Regardless of the ludicrous nature of a three-year investigation where the perpetrator never got charged with the initial suspected crime" qualifier? NRO's editors point out that that "ludicrous nature" isn't so easy to dismiss:

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. [emphases added]

Of course, there was no such evidence, and Fitzgerald knew it, which is why he never bothered trying to make the case for it. Because of that, the defense was barred from pursuing discovery in order to bolster Libby's defense against that prosecutorial avenue.

Then, in the sentencing phase, when it was too late for the defense to object, Fitzgerald suddenly pirhouetted and sought, in effect, a last minute do-over:

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.

Nice little bit of prosecutorial jiu-jitsu, huh? Go after Libby on "process" charges, go out of the way to downplay the underlying accusations of "exposing a covert CIA agent" (because Fitzgerald knew the whole damn time who really blabbed Valerie Wilson's name to Robert Novak; namely, Colin Powell's top stooge Richard Armitage, who wasn't scandalfodder because he was anti-Bush), obtain a tabula rasa conviction that then can serve as the blank check for the original hardcore charges you couldn't prove. A bait & switch screwing, the latest chapter in the long, outrageous saga of Democrats criminalizing policy differences going all the way back to Watergate.

It touches a personal nerve for me because of the process charges on which Libby was convicted:

[T]he 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.

As long-time readers of this site and RepublicanForum.com know, I, myself, was almost put in "the Libby position" almost a decade ago. I was taking a nap on a Good Friday afternoon when there was a knock on my door. I peered out the window and saw two men on my front stoop dressed in dark suits with white shirts and thin ties. I figured they were Jehovah's Witnesses and went back to bed.

Only they kept knocking. For ten solid minutes. Even for JW's they were persistent. Finally I decided, against my standard policy of ignoring such unwelcome entreaties, to open the door and tell them to get lost.

I never got the chance. They identified themselves as being from the United States Department of Justice and they were serving me with a federal grand jury subpoena. Only then did I notice their sedan parked across the street. Obviously from a government motorpool, as I can't imagine any consumer willingly driving a car that butt-ugly.

The day before my grand jury appearance, my attorney and I met with the Assistant U.S. Attorney and a few other feds to winnow down what they'd actually ask me under oath the next day. The meeting took all afternoon and was full of one attempted "gotcha" after another about - does this sound familiar? - events that transpired, at that time, almost a year earlier. Finally my legal eagle excused us for a moment, took me out into the hall, and asked me what the devil was going on. I told him I had no idea. He went back in, alone, and basically told the AUSA that if he thought they were intimidate me into getting to the guy they were really after (my boss at the time), they were wasting their time because I didn't know anything.

And I didn't. I was a complete naïf. But I was the lone accountant in a small (ten employees total at its peak) IT dealer, and the feds couldn't believe that I wasn't neck-deep in whatever nefarious business they thought my boss was conducting.

Thanks to my attorney, the one lawyer on Earth who should not deservedly meet a Shakespearean fate, I was in and out of that grand jury room in ten minutes. But I wasn't yet out of the woods.

There was a civil lawsuit to accompany this far-ranging criminal investigation, and my employer's parent company tapped me by default to give the main deposition since my boss was taking the fifth. And, naïf that I still was, I went into that room on the seventy-eighth floor of Seattle's Columbia Tower fat, dumb, and stupid - which is to say, without my lawyer present.

The light on that camera at the other end of the conference table went on, and I was like Cindy Brady in the quiz show episode. And that was before the plaintiff's counsel started drilling me like Tommy Lee did Pamela Anderson on the famous bootleg video. Another afternoon (and much of the morning) of gotchas that I knew nothing about but they were convinced I had practically authored. By the end of that day if I had been asked what my name was, I would have wanted to get out my driver's license just to make sure.

But, once again, God's grace intervened, in the form of the presiding judge in the case issuing a blanket stay. Before the case could resume my boss and our parent company settled. And a damn good thing, too, because after my ordeal adjourned and before I learned of the stay, the other shysters present advised me, pro bono, that in their professional opinions, it sounded to them like the plaintiff's counsel was trying to frame me for mail fraud and drag me back into the criminal side of the dispute. Because as my boss' accountant, how could I not have known about all the shady dealings he had going on?

Easy: I was a naïf. A babe in the woods. The perfect patsy. And if events hadn't bailed me out, if they had gone after me along with my boss (who eventually copped a plea and served five months in jail and five months' house arrest, with a $900,000 fine), I may well have ended up like Scooter Libby, like H.R. Haldeman thirty years ago, convicted of the "crime" of lacking an eidetic memory and not having the good sense to say so rather than try to reconstruct years-old conversations with a recollection that doesn't include what I had for lunch last Tuesday.

Only it's worse for Libby, because he's being sentenced for crimes of which he was never convicted by a megalomaniacal prosecutor out to get him out of his own sheer professional narcissism.

But all that mattered was that Fitzgerald won a conviction; not what that conviction was for. The whole thing was a setup from the beginning. Whatever else Mr. Morrissey might call this, neither he nor anybody else can call this justice.

That's why NRO is spot-on that President Bush should pardon Mr. Libby post-haste. It'd the least he can do, seeing as how it was his DOJ that cravenly sicced Fitzgerald on the former vice-presidential chief-of-staff in the first place.

He won't, of course. Pity Libby isn't a Democrat, like Sandy Berger; he'd probably have gotten off scot-free then.

UPDATE: Bill Kristol sums it up well:

Will Bush pardon Libby? Apparently not - even if it means a man who worked closely with him and sought tirelessly to do what was right for the country goes to prison. Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino, noting that the appeals process was underway, said, "Given that and in keeping with what we have said in the past, the President has not intervened so far in any other criminal matter and he is going to decline to do so now."

So much for loyalty, or decency, or courage. For President Bush, loyalty is apparently a one-way street; decency is something he's for as long as he doesn't have to take any risks in its behalf;and courage - well, that's nowhere to be seen. Many of us used to respect President Bush. Can one respect him still?

Does it even matter anymore? And doesn't that say all one needs to know about just how far the Bush presidency has jumped the shark?