AP News, June 6th, 2007
The latest twist in the CIA leak scandal has Vice President Dick Cheney saying he hopes his former chief of staff, now sentenced to 30 months in prison, will eventually get off.
And that, legal experts say, is an odd statement for a vice president to make.
While expressing support for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney and President Bush are also in the position of being officials sworn to uphold the law, running the branch of government that prosecuted Libby.
"It's a disappointment whenever a person who occupies a high office and takes an oath doesn't respond to a demonstrated serious criminal event in a serious governmental way," former Iran-Contra prosecutor John Barrett said Tuesday night.
"It's an adversary process and I understand the personal dimension, but the United States is the side of the case that President Bush and Vice President Cheney are on. Those are their jobs," said Barrett, now a law professor at St. John's University in New York City.
In the Valerie Plame case, Bush and particularly Cheney are more than mere friends of Libby, and more than mere disinterested public officials. Their actions are within the scope of the criminal investigation. Both were witnesses who underwent questioning by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
Within hours of Libby's sentencing, Cheney issued a statement saying that "the defense has indicated it plans to appeal the conviction in the case."
"Speaking as friends, we hope that our system will return a final result consistent with what we know of this fine man," said Cheney, saying that he was speaking on behalf of himself and his wife.
Asked Wednesday about a possible pardon for Libby, Bush said "it wouldn't be appropriate for me to discuss it while the process is going forward."
"My heart goes out to his family and it wouldn't be appropriate for me to discuss his case," said the president.
"Libby's lies derailed the investigation, and Cheney's role has never been fully explained; the comments of the president and especially the vice president are troubling in this context," said Penn State University law professor Lance Cole, a former attorney for Democrats on the Senate Whitewater Committee and a consultant to the 9/11 commission.
Cheney's statement is unusual historically, says presidential scholar Stanley Kutler, author of a well-known book on the Watergate scandal.
"I know of no time in Watergate where someone who was convicted got the warm embrace of those in power," said Kutler, author of "The Wars of Watergate."
For former prosecutors like Barrett, "crime is crime," whether it has a political backdrop to it or not.
For presidential scholars like Kutler, the Libby case is an instance of the Bush administration's supporters bemoaning what they call the criminalizing of political conduct, an assertion Kutler calls "spurious."
There is a parallel in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Supporters of the Reagan administration criticized independent counsel Lawrence Walsh for what they said was criminalizing a political battle between the executive branch and Congress. When he won jury convictions against former national security adviser John Poindexter and National Security Council staffer Oliver North, neither drew the kind of public sympathy from then-President George H.W. Bush that Libby is getting from his former bosses.
Subsequently, the president short-circuited the criminal investigation of the Iran-Contra affair, pardoning six former administration figures including ex-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on Christmas Eve 1992. The pardons came two weeks before Weinberger was to have gone on trial in a case in which the president was a potential witness.
Walsh, the prosecutor, said the Iran-Contra pardons completed a "coverup, which has continued for more than six years."
Among those pardoned was Elliott Abrams, currently a deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration.
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EDITOR'S NOTE _ Pete Yost has covered legal issues in Washington for The Associated Press for 21 years.
