Investor's Business Daily, March 6th, 2007
The Law: Scooter Libby's prosecution has come to a sad close, with the jury finding the former White House aide guilty on four of five counts, including obstruction of justice -- in a case that never should have been tried.
We'd like to think this verdict will be overturned on appeal. To us, Libby's trial always seemed more about prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's political pandering and careerism than about justice -- a horrible thing to say in a country founded on the sanctity of the rule of law.
In the end, Fitzgerald didn't prove the case he said he would in 2005, when charges were first filed against Libby for allegedly lying to the FBI and a grand jury about how he discovered CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity -- and for telling reporters about it.
Libby did so, it was then alleged, to get back at Plame's husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson. In a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed, Wilson falsely claimed President Bush lied about Iraq's acquisition of nuclear material in Africa to go to war.
Whipped up, Democrats and the Big Media portrayed it as a case of war-crazed neocons in the White House trying in paranoid fashion to take down their enemies. Sadly, Fitzgerald bought this idea.
But when his case began to implode, Fitzgerald simply shifted gears and turned it into an obstruction of justice case -- one built on the laughable notion that a poor memory is felonious behavior.
Today, Fitzgerald's spurious victory means Libby faces 25 years in prison and fines of a million dollars for misremembering conversations he had years ago -- an awful penalty for human frailty.
Since charges were filed against Libby on Oct. 28, 2005, we've found nearly everything Fitzgerald initially alleged was false, misleading or just wrong. Contrary to Fitzgerald's claims, Libby didn't "blow" any CIA officer's name; he didn't "leak" Plame's name to the media; nor was any real crime committed.
In fact, Libby didn't reveal the identity of a covert agent for the simple reason that Plame wasn't one. She hadn't had covert status for nine years, making her, under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, not covert at all.
Also, Libby didn't reveal Plame's name to the media first; State Department official Richard Armitage did. And Plame really "outed" herself by appearing in Wilson's "Who's Who in America" entry.
As Robert Novak, the columnist who first revealed Plame's identity in the press, said, it "was well-known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA."
In the end, the only proven liar in all this was Wilson. He lied at least three times to the Senate about his "mission" to the African nation of Niger. He said he wasn't sent by Plame, his deskbound CIA wife (he was); claimed he found no evidence Iraq had shopped for yellowcake uranium there (he did); he even lied about forged documents he claimed he had seen before his trip, but in fact hadn't.
Wilson certainly had a motive to lie, being a foreign policy adviser to presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 and a contributor to Al Gore in 2000. In the interest of justice, we ask, where are the charges against Wilson, whose lies were real and calculated?
While we're on the question of justice, why did former Clinton White House national security guru Sandy Berger get off with a hand slap for the actual theft and possible destruction of classified documents? That's a real crime -- one the media excused.
As we said, this wasn't justice. It was a travesty. We hope President Bush will have the guts to pardon Libby for his non-crime.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
