Hypocrisy Over Libby

Hypocrisy Over Libby

by Mark Luedtke

Bill Clinton admitted to lying to a grand jury, and he never spent a day in prison or even lost his job. The same liberals who are up in arms because President Bush commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence want to reward the admitted perjurer with 4 more years as co-president. Bill Clinton lied to cover-up sexual assault and witness tampering. There was no underlying crime in the Libby case, but liberals are gathering torches and pitchforks because Bush saved him from prison. Liberals love it when their side gets away with lies, but those on the other side must pay a steep price.

This whole Plame/Wilson/Libby affair is an encapsulation of what's wrong with our government: self-interest, dishonesty, hypocrisy and exaggerated partisanship.

It all started with Valerie Plame's self-interest. Frustrated from riding a desk, Plame wished to return to a covert agent role at the CIA. She was against the Iraq war from the start, and when she had an opportunity to assert herself beyond her bureaucratic position into the pre-war debate, she recommended her husband, Joseph Wilson, for the task of verifying whether or not Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy yellow-cake, a form of uranium, from Niger. Unfortunately, instead of sending a professional, the CIA took Plame's advice.

Wilson traveled to Niger and obtained confirmation from the former prime minister of Niger that an Iraqi delegation had expressed interest in yellow-cake, but Niger let the matter drop. Wilson dutifully returned to Washington and reported his findings. President Bush used Wilson's confirmation to back up his now famous statement in his State of the Union that, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Wilson's lies followed. He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times claiming he had not received confirmation. He also testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he had seen a suspected forged memo documenting Saddam's attempted purchase before that memo had ever surfaced. After examining all the evidence, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Wilson had lied in the op-ed and in his testimony.

You don't have to take my word regarding those facts. The Senate Intelligence Committee reports about Wilson's and Plame's actions, including Plame's email recommendation, are readily available. Wilson and Plame's lies have been exposed by their own words, but liberals regard them as heroes.

After Wilson's op-ed was published, Richard Armitage, a war opponent who worked at the State Department, not the White House, accidentally leaked the information to Robert Novak that Plame had recommended her husband, Wilson. Novak's revelation triggered a partisan rampage. Reports from several reporters and more witnesses that Plame's marriage to Wilson was common knowledge in Washington were drowned out by the baseless attacks on the White House.

Unrelenting partisan attacks led to the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald as special prosecutor to investigate the leak. Within the first 2 weeks of his investigation, Fitzgerald discovered that Valerie Plame had been a bureaucrat, not a covert agent as defined by law, well past the statutory limit on outing covert agents. Fitzgerald also learned that Richard Armitage had leaked Plame's name to Robert Novak. At that point, Fitzgerald had met the goals of his investigation, and any responsible prosecutor would have shut it down, announced his findings, and ended the whole sordid non-affair.

But Fitzgerald saw a chance to pay Libby back for defeating him in a high profile case several years before, so, stoking partisan fervor, Fitzgerald orchestrated a grand jury process that guaranteed everybody in his investigation would make statements that contradicted each other and even contradicted themselves because of imperfect memory of minutia recalled several times over several years. For 3 years, Fitzgerald spun his web of contradictions. Inevitably, nearly a dozen witnesses told contradictory stories, but Fitzgerald singled out only his nemesis, Libby, and charged him with perjury and obstruction of justice. Because Fitzgerald knew that Plame had not been legally covert at the time of the outing, he didn't charge anybody with that crime.

When Fitzgerald ended his investigation, President Bush should have stepped in and pardoned Libby and fired Fitzgerald for conducting a witch-hunt. It was a mistake for Bush to sit on the sidelines and allow Fitzgerald's personal vendetta, fueled by partisanship, to continue. Libby was convicted by a partisan jury that wanted to see Cheney in the dock, as they told the press after the trial, but settled for convicting Libby because he was all they had. After the trial, when his claim couldn't be refuted in court, Fitzgerald claimed Plame was covert in a successful attempt to draw a harsher sentence.

Fitzgerald's prosecution is reminiscent of Mike Nifong's Duke case. Like Nifong, Fitzgerald withheld exculpatory evidence for 3 years that would have ended his investigation. Like Nifong, Fitzgerald used partisanship to advance self-interest. Unlike Nifong, Fitzgerald got away with prosecutorial abuse instead of losing his job.

Commuting Libby's sentence allows Libby a chance to clear his name. A pardon can't do that at this point, though I expect if Libby's appeal fails, Bush will pardon him. President Bush missed his window of opportunity to take the high ground and use his bully pulpit against a rogue prosecutor powered by partisanship, and so liberals hypocritically rage on while the Plame non-affair continues to divide the nation. But Scooter Libby is paying an unjust price.