Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Free Scooter NOW!!
It's hard to argue with much of this article. It's one thing to prosecute some process crimes along the way, but when the only prosecution is a process crime that didn't even involve the party that did the leaking and it was determined that the leaking wasn't even a crime it's time for President Bush to step up and say we won't have this foolishness going on in his justice department. Scooter Libby should have been pardoned before I typed this.
Guess who else thinks Libby should be pardoned? Did you guess that it was one of the jurors? Oh and just for fun too! We now have a juror that is BBQ buds with half the witnesses against Libby and another that thinks it would be cool to convict someone leaving them in financial ruin and then pardon them for sport. Unbelievable!
For that, in essence, is what this case is really all about. We learned long ago--and Mr. Fitzgerald knew from the start of his probe in 2003--that Mr. Libby was not the source of the leak to columnist Robert Novak that started all this. Mr. Libby thus had no real motive to cover up this non-crime. What he did have strong cause to do was rebut the lies that Mr. Wilson was telling about the Administration and Mr. Cheney--lies confirmed as lies by a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004.
Mr. Libby did talk to some reporters about the Administration's case for war in 2003, and he did mention Ms. Plame in some cases. So the jury apparently decided that, when asked about those conversations by the FBI and grand jury, he had lied about his own sources of information about Joe Wilson and his wife. In other words, he has not been convicted of lying to anyone about the case for war in Iraq, or about Mr. Wilson or his wife.
Rather, he has been convicted of telling the truth about Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame to some reporters but then not owning up to it. One tragic irony is that if Mr. Libby had only taken the Harold Ickes grand-jury strategy and said "I don't recall," he probably never would have been indicted. But our guess is that he tried to cooperate with the grand jury because he never really believed he had anything to hide. This may also explain why Mr. Libby never retained an experienced Beltway attorney until he was indicted.
Guess who else thinks Libby should be pardoned? Did you guess that it was one of the jurors? Oh and just for fun too! We now have a juror that is BBQ buds with half the witnesses against Libby and another that thinks it would be cool to convict someone leaving them in financial ruin and then pardon them for sport. Unbelievable!
