This George Bush fellow has major league cojones. It
really amazes me.
Start with the obvious:
The case against “Scooter” Libby was a total fraud. Completely
bogus. The publicity-mad demoness Valerie Plame was not a covert
overseas agent at the time the whole megillah about her erupted. So
there was no, none, nada, law breaking by reporting that she was a
CIA employee.
Second, there was no reason for the special prosecutor, the full
on publicity hound Mr. Fitzgerald, to have even gone on with the
investigation for a week or even a day. He knew in the first 24
hours who had told Bob Novak that Ms. Wilson was the one who sent
her husband, the Democrat operative, de facto if not
de jure, Joe Wilson, to search for facts about uranium in
a little known African nation called Niger. And Mr. Fitzgerald knew
it was not Karl Rove or Scooter Libby. Why then did he continue the
investigation and torment the many totally innocent people he
tortured? Why did he drive honest civil servants to despair and
impoverishment when he basically had no mission?
(And isn’t he a lot like a certain prosecutor in North Carolina
who pilloried totally innocent Duke University La Crosse players in
a totally trumped up, absolutely bogus case when there was no solid
evidence against them at all? Is it not frightening what an out of
control prosecutor can do in a free country? The wicked man in
North Carolina faces prosecution and has already had other
sanctions. Is this being considered for Mr. Fitzgerald?)
Third, while prosecutors can do almost anything they damned well
please, it is not considered de rigueur to prosecute for
perjury in an investigation in which there is no underlying crime.
But that’s precisely what happened in the Libby case. Mr.
Fitzgerald prosecuted for perjury even though there was no crime he
was investigating. It was just a mammoth unnecessary, phony fishing
expedition to snare Bush operatives that caught Libby. He had been
asked countless questions and finally got a few wrong and so the
prosecutor sprung.
The judge should have just tossed out the case on the first day
of the trial. There simply was nothing there but prosecutorial
overreach. But the trial went on. A Washington, D.C. jury — a pool
of men and women who were confused, to put it charitably — found
for the prosecution and then the real evil began.
At the trial, the prosecutor had conceded that there was no
underlying crime and that Libby had not “outed” anyone. But then in
the sentencing phase the prosecutor completely falsified himself
and claimed Libby had done serious national security damage — by
naming an employee of the CIA who was not covert and not overseas,
contrary to his statements at trial.
The judge, who must have been a real whiz in law school (yes, I
know he was appointed by Bush), sentenced Libby, a first offender
who will never be in court again, to two and a half years in
prison. It was insane.
Now, enter George W Bush. Desperately wounded by the Iraq War,
basically friendless in Washington, D.C., he was not expected to
risk one iota of his dwindling political piggy bank to rescue
Scooter — who had, of course, been chief of staff for Bush’s Vice
President, the cordially disliked Dick Cheney. Why should he? He
has enough troubles.
But Mr. Bush saw a basic wrong. A man who should never have seen
the inside of a courtroom as a defendant had been pilloried for no
good reason and then sentenced to a Stalinist sentence. His basic
decency overrode political and PR considerations. He simply did the
right thing. He let an innocent man breathe the air of freedom. He
used the power of his office to say “enough” to an out of control
prosecutor, an out of control grand jury, and an out of control
judge and jury. In a simple phrase, once again, he did the right
thing regardless of cost.
I am not sure if this was his finest hour, but it was a fine
hour.
