(HOST) President Bush decided this week to commute the thirty month jail term of Lewis “Scooter” Libby in the case of the leaking of a covert CIA agent’s identity. This morning commentator Barrie Dunsmore offers his opinion as to the true significance of this case.
(DUNSMORE) First, let me say that it appears President George W. Bush was within his Constitutional prerogatives when he decided to commute the prison sentence of Lewis Libby, former chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. Yes, it was a political decision, which he took without going through the normal Department of Justice review process. And his argument that two-and-a-half years’ jail time for Libby was excessive really doesn’t hold water when compared to the sentences ordinary people are regularly given for similar crimes of lying to a grand jury and obstruction of justice.
But all that is rather beside the point. For me, the significance of the case of the outed CIA agent has always been that it was really all about a White House cover-up. That cover-up was initiated when the rationale for the invasion of Iraq – Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction – was proven to be a fabrication.
We learned during the Libby trial just how much consternation there was in the Bush-Cheney White House when their justification for the invasion began to unravel. And it was the man who was the war’s leading advocate, Vice President Dick Cheney, who was most deeply worried.
The prosecution could never prove exactly what Cheney told Libby to do. But we do now know that Cheney personally declassified selected parts of the pre-invasion National Intelligence Estimate, and that Libby leaked this somewhat misleading version to friendly reporters. And we know it was Cheney who told Libby the identity of CIA operative Valerie Wilson, whose husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson had become a major administration critic. And we know that Libby did indeed leak Wilson’s name to several reporters and denied under oath having done so – which is why he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice.
At the beginning of his trial, Libby’s own lawyer said the defense would show how he had been made a White House “fall guy.” And he indicated that the Vice President himself would be called upon to testify. For reasons never made clear, neither happened.
In his summation at Libby’s trial, Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald talked about a “cloud” over the Vice President’s office, suggesting that because of Libby’s lies it was not possible to know precisely what had transpired at the White House as the spurious case for war fell apart.
Certainly, Libby could have made things easier on himself had he been willing to cooperate with the prosecutor and tell what he knew about the White House cover-up. But Libby remained loyal to Cheney. That loyalty has now been rewarded by the President’s commutation of his jail sentence with, very likely, a full pardon before Bush leaves office.
This outcome of the case was inevitable because someone who knew as much as Libby about White House machinations before and after the Iraq invasion simply could not be permitted to become a disgruntled former employee facing thirty months of jail time. Thus, the cover-up continues.
Barrie Dunsmore is a veteran diplomatic and foreign correspondent for ABC News, now living in Charlotte.