Scooter Convicted

[William Joyce]

Well you know what's really going on here. Fitzgerald is anti-Semitic.

 

[Annie]

Well you know what's really going on here. Fitzgerald is anti-Semitic.

Nope, Fitzgerald is a special prosecutor with all the baggage and privileges inherent.

 

[Annie]

Like Best of the Web for Coulter, this one seems fair for Scooter. The Special Prosecutor is a position which should not exist:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDdmY2E0YmM1Y2RjY2Q1NWU2MzNhNjBmYjZhNTdiODU=

I Don't Agree [Mark Levin]

Ashcroft's cowardice in passing the buck to Comey, who then passed it to Fitzgerald, does not excuse what I and many view as Fitzgerald's over-the-top investigation. Most prosecutors that I know try to determine what crimes they are looking into. Since Fitzgerald didn't charge anyone with revealing Plame's identity, he must have concluded early on that there was no such crime relevant to his investigation. And he knew Libby hadn't "leaked" to Woodward or Novak. That's where it should have ended. But it didn't. I find his conduct very troubling. He sought special authority from Comey to drag reporters before the grand jury (authority no prosecutor to my mind has ever exercised let alone sought). His press conference announcing the indictment was grossly misleading. He knew Libby hadn't been the source who revealed Plame's identity. He knew that many of his own witnesses had poor memories. He knew that Joe Wilson was a liar (if he reads newspapers or Senate Intel report).

His closing argument was politically charged as he referenced Cheney repeatedly and Bush as well. And he went back to the conspiracy theory he chose not to bring in a formal indictment, i.e., that Cheney led an effort to put out information about Wilson. This is the most absurd prosecution in my memory, and the idea that the man in charge of it should be viewed as simply following the law and addressing the circumstances before him is not credible to me.

As for the juror, I watched him carefully as he spoke, and spoke, and spoke.

I can see that the former journalist had a lot of sway in the jury room. I can see why Fitzgerald wanted him there. He said they were sympathetic to Libby but wondered where Rove was. Yes, Wells brought it up first during his opening, arguing that Libby was the fall guy. So what? That was Wells's theory of the case. Rove never testified, for either side. An entire trial had subsequently occurred. The jury instructions had nothing to do with Rove.

It was a very odd statement for the juror to make — "where's Rove" — when he and the others are supposed to be focused on the evidence before them.

This suggests to me that they weren't solely focused on the evidence. And they were encouraged to look elsewhere at the end of the trial by none other than Fitzgerald in his closing statement — who sounded like Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews. I have no idea if the jury was faithful to its mission, as Andy insists. Let me suggest that they may well have swallowed the bait Fitzgerald threw them in his closing respecting the Republican White House out to settle a score with poor Wilson and Plame. The "where's Rove" comment by this juror, after the trial was over and the verdict was in, brings me to a different conclusion than Andy.

More generally, as long as cases with political overtones are tried in the District of Columbia, Republicans will be at a severe disadvantage. I don't believe that jurors are more perfect than the rest of society. I don't believe in every case they are able to ignore their own biases. And that's especially true when they're being prodded in that direction by the prosecution.

Until something is done about this, people like Bill Clinton and Sany Berger will get what amounts to a pass and Lewis Libby will be facing prison time.

03/06 04:58 PM

 

[Annie]

A reasonable stance:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDk4ZWM0N2RiZWZkZjE4NzFmMWEyYzM4ODYzMTQ3Mzc=

Pardon Libby

By The Editors

President Bush should pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The trial that concluded in a guilty verdict on four of five counts conclusively proved only one thing: A White House aide became the target of a politicized prosecution set in motion by bureaucratic infighting and political cowardice.


Pardon Libby 03/06


When partisans pounced on Bob Novak’s July 14, 2003, revelation that the wife of administration critic Joe Wilson worked at the CIA, they adopted Wilson’s paranoid persecution theory. Then a scandal-hungry media joined in. Novak’s unidentified administration sources were widely accused of criminal wrongdoing: having “outed” a covert agent.

The alleged motive for the leak was to punish Joe Wilson, whose account of his mission to Niger supposedly unmasked the administration’s manufactured case for the war in Iraq. The victim in this set piece was Valerie Plame Wilson, and the villains were Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby.

From the very beginning of the ensuing spectacle, petty agendas subverted justice. The CIA, at war with the White House, and in particular with the vice president’s office, referred the leak to the Justice Department, even though the agency certainly knew that there had been no criminal violation since Plame wasn’t “covert.” (According to the relevant statute, only the leak of a covert agent’s identity is a criminal act.) The CIA’s spokesman had also confirmed Plame’s employment to Novak, without sounding any alarms over the revelation of classified information. The referral to Justice—leaked to the media—was the act of an agency more concerned with shifting the blame for faulty Iraq intelligence than with protecting a supposedly vulnerable agent.

With the matter in the Justice Department’s lap, such critics as New York senator Charles Schumer demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor, claiming that then–attorney general John Ashcroft couldn’t oversee the probe because he had a conflict of interest. Even though there was no evidence that the department’s career prosecutors were unable to handle the case, Ashcroft and his top deputy, James Comey, quickly gave in to Schumer’s demands. Comey appointed his friend in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, as the special prosecutor, and gave him even more powers than the old independent counsels had.

None of this was a profile in courage on the administration’s part, but the true insanity of the situation was withheld from the public until years later, when we learned that, long before the Justice Department had appointed Fitzgerald, it knew who had leaked to Novak. Early in the investigation, deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage informed investigators that he had told Novak about Mrs. Wilson (although he left out the fact that he had also leaked to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward). But like the savvy bureaucratic infighter that he is, Armitage kept quiet publicly, allowing the vice president’s office to take the heat for something he had done.

So why did Fitzgerald go forward? Maybe someday he’ll tell us, but we’re not betting on it. Reasonable people can conclude that it was only Scooter Libby’s imperfect memory—not willful deception—that gave rise to the charges of lying under oath and obstruction of justice. Among the supporting players—including CIA officials, Bob Novak, Woodward and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and Time’s Matthew Cooper—no two participants in any conversation about Valerie Plame had the same recollection.

Whatever his motivations, Fitzgerald adopted the discredited Wilson’s script and focused his three-year investigation on Cheney, Libby, and Rove—and not, inexplicably, on others. Not on Armitage. Not on Ari Fleischer, either. The recent trial revealed that the former White House press secretary was granted immunity from prosecution, and that he admitted to telling two reporters about Plame’s employment. Those reporters were never even questioned. Nor did any charges arise from Fleischer’s faulty memory, even though a third reporter (Pincus) testified that Fleischer had told him too about Plame—something that Fleischer denied under oath.

There should have been no referral, no special counsel, no indictments, and no trial. The “CIA-leak case” has been a travesty. A good man has paid a very heavy price for the Left’s fevers, the media’s scandal-mongering, and President Bush’s failure to unify his own administration. Justice demands that Bush issue a pardon and lower the curtain on an embarrassing drama that shouldn’t have lasted beyond its opening act.

 

[Annie]

I personally agree with this, the blame lies with Joe Wilson:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTUyZTc5MDMzMmE3ZmIxYzI4NTk5ZDc5NWM1MzFlNTM=

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Today's Verdict [Bill Bennett]

What we know is this: Guilty on four out of five counts is bad. But at the same time, we may have just seen the latest and most dramatic example of a troublesome trend of the times in which we live: the criminalization of politics. What was alleged in public—the terrible thing that caused the outrage—was the outing of a classified CIA agent. But this thing, as terrible as it was alleged to be, was not only never proven, it—the gravamen of the whole dispute—was never even charged. It seems plausible to assume that Libby was found guilty by the jury because they didn’t believe his account regarding statements recalled from his memory. But, when well-established journalists’ memories fail them in a trial about conversations that seemingly didn’t mean that much, it is hard not to excuse the Vice President's Chief of Staff about those very same conversations in a time of war.

This case will have a backlash the press will regret: sources will be less likely to speak with them, not because the press was called to testify but because senior government officials will be expected to remember every jot and tittle of what they say to each member of the press in their background, off-the-record, and investigative interviews.

For my own part, based on the above, I still do not believe that Scooter Libby’s actions were criminal and that he is deserving of jail. There might have been real crimes here, but if there were, unfortunately, they were never charged. Joe Wilson’s hands are not clean, and neither are Richard Armitage’s.

In the aftermath of this case, I maintain what I said the first time Joe Wilson alleged the outing of his wife: if your spouse’s position is of such a classified nature that disclosure of her position would put her job in jeopardy, then don’t write a political op-ed in the New York Times that has implications for what your spouse did to put you in a position to write that op-ed.

03/06 03:30 PM

 

[BATMAN]

Libby deserved to be convicted.
Now we need to try Rove and Cheney. And find them guilty.

So it really wouldn't matter what the evidence showed - just try them AND convict them.

Hopefully, Libby's lawyers can keep him out of jail until Bush pardons him at the end of his term.

 

[Eightball]

So it really wouldn't matter what the evidence showed - just try them AND convict them.

Hopefully, Libby's lawyers can keep him out of jail until Bush pardons him at the end of his term.

You must understand with these liberals, that this is a quest to the very end. Guilt by association trumps any and all hard evidence.

If they had their way, all of us conservatives would be in internment camps in Utah, so they could banish all bumps in the road to Europeanizing the U.S..

 

[cygonaut]

Forgive me if my heart skipped a beat when I read this thread topic.

I didn't even know I'd been accused!

I thought it had to do with you too.

 

[Bullypulpit]

Forgive me for a bit of schadenfreude at the verdict in 'Scooter' Libby's trial. But he WAS the patsy, the fall guy, the stooge for those higher up on the White House food chain. They did leak the name of a NOC operative and this, supposedly, at a time of war.

As for the other players, well, perhaps time will tell. At least we got a look at how the Bush administration deals with its critics. When simple threats don't work, they will seek to destroy their opponents credibility and/or livelihood. Outing Valerie Plame was an example of both. A key fact that the supporters of the Bush administration are omitting here is that, it WAS the CIA that referred the matter to the DoJ for investigation. The CIA would not have done so unless they felt there was what they considered a substantial breach of FIIPA.

That said, it should be interesting to see what comes to light in the civil suite filed against Dick Cheney , <i>et al</i>. After all, the rules of evidence in a civil trail are different from those in a criminal trial.

 

[Little-Acorn]

They did leak the name of a NOC operative

BZZZZTT.

Has little bully ever gotten anything right about Republicans yet?

 

[BATMAN]

Forgive me for a bit of schadenfreude at the verdict in 'Scooter' Libby's trial. But he WAS the patsy, the fall guy, the stooge for those higher up on the White House food chain. They did leak the name of a NOC operative and this, supposedly, at a time of war.

Did it ever come out in the trial that she was actually an undercover operative - or did the jury NOT get to hear any of that?

I do like how it has now come out that the jury spokesman has worked for Bob Woodward and been a neighbor of Tim Russert - both of whom testified in the trial.

 

[dilloduck]

So it really wouldn't matter what the evidence showed - just try them AND convict them.

Hopefully, Libby's lawyers can keep him out of jail until Bush pardons him at the end of his term.

To be fair he should stay in jail just as long as Clinton had to.

 

[trobinett]

To be fair he should stay in jail just as long as Clinton had to.

Lets see, that would be? Oh, I get it.......

 

[Annie]

Forgive me for a bit of schadenfreude at the verdict in 'Scooter' Libby's trial. But he WAS the patsy, the fall guy, the stooge for those higher up on the White House food chain. They did leak the name of a NOC operative and this, supposedly, at a time of war.

As for the other players, well, perhaps time will tell. At least we got a look at how the Bush administration deals with its critics. When simple threats don't work, they will seek to destroy their opponents credibility and/or livelihood. Outing Valerie Plame was an example of both. A key fact that the supporters of the Bush administration are omitting here is that, it WAS the CIA that referred the matter to the DoJ for investigation. The CIA would not have done so unless they felt there was what they considered a substantial breach of FIIPA.

That said, it should be interesting to see what comes to light in the civil suite filed against Dick Cheney , <i>et al</i>. After all, the rules of evidence in a civil trail are different from those in a criminal trial.

Gee, even WaPo gets it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/06/AR2007030602020.html

The Libby Verdict
The serious consequences of a pointless Washington scandal

Wednesday, March 7, 2007; A16

THE CONVICTION of I. Lewis Libby on charges of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice was grounded in strong evidence and what appeared to be careful deliberation by a jury. The former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney told the FBI and a grand jury that he had not leaked the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to journalists but rather had learned it from them. But abundant testimony at his trial showed that he had found out about Ms. Plame from official sources and was dedicated to discrediting her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Particularly for a senior government official, lying under oath is a serious offense. Mr. Libby's conviction should send a message to this and future administrations about the dangers of attempting to block official investigations.

The fall of this skilled and long-respected public servant is particularly sobering because it arose from a Washington scandal remarkable for its lack of substance. It was propelled not by actual wrongdoing but by inflated and frequently false claims, and by the aggressive and occasionally reckless response of senior Bush administration officials -- culminating in Mr. Libby's perjury.

Mr. Wilson was embraced by many because he was early in publicly charging that the Bush administration had "twisted," if not invented, facts in making the case for war against Iraq. In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr. Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had circulated at the highest levels of the administration.

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false -- and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame's name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.

...

It would have been sensible for Mr. Fitzgerald to end his investigation after learning about Mr. Armitage. Instead, like many Washington special prosecutors before him, he pressed on, pursuing every tangent in the case. In so doing he unnecessarily subjected numerous journalists to the ordeal of having to disclose confidential sources or face imprisonment. One, Judith Miller of the New York Times, lost several court appeals and spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify. The damage done to journalists' ability to obtain information from confidential government sources has yet to be measured.

Mr. Wilson's case has besmirched nearly everyone it touched. The former ambassador will be remembered as a blowhard. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were overbearing in their zeal to rebut Mr. Wilson and careless in their handling of classified information. Mr. Libby's subsequent false statements were reprehensible. And Mr. Fitzgerald has shown again why handing a Washington political case to a federal special prosecutor is a prescription for excess.

Mr. Fitzgerald was, at least, right about one thing: The Wilson-Plame case, and Mr. Libby's conviction, tell us nothing about the war in Iraq.

 

[red states rule]

The trial was a farce. Libby has very good grounds for appeal.




Does the Libby Verdict Have Appeal?
Making sense of legal nonsense.

By Victoria Toensing

The Scooter Libby verdict makes no logical sense, but that won’t bother the legal notions of an appellate court. In convicting on four counts but acquitting of one, the jury made the peculiar decision that Libby lied before the grand jury about his conversation with Time’s Matt Cooper, but not to the FBI when the agents questioned him about the same conversation. Libby gave the same general answer in both fora, specifically that he told Matt Cooper that he did not know if it were true that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a case where the courts have overturned a conviction because the individual verdict counts were internally inconsistent. But there are issues that could be legally significant on appeal. To

The court punished Libby for not taking the stand: During trial the Libby legal team had said it was probable, but not certain, he would take the stand. Any criminal-defense attorney knows that decision is never made until the final moments of a trial. When the decision was made that Libby would not testify, the judge was, incredibly, furious and limited his defense evidence on the memory issue.

The court prevented the defense from impeaching Tim Russert: The NBC anchorman, who has a law degree, testified he did not know a lawyer could not accompany a witness before the grand jury. The defense then exhumed three clips where Russert had said on the air that a lawyer cannot go into the grand jury with his client. The judge would not allow the jury to hear that other honorable people sometimes forget or misspeak when being grilled on the witness stand.

The court permitted Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to refer to Valerie Plame as being “covert” or having a “classified” job throughout trial and specifically during closing argument. Neither of those highly prejudicial characterizations was proven at trial. Even if Plame’s job were “classified,” as Fitzgerald reiterated in his press conference after conviction, there is no criminal violation in publishing her name. That legal gap is why Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODM4MDMxMTgzNzU1YTVkZTliZDUyZmVjN2JmMWI4ODM

 

[Adam's Apple]

I do like how it has now come out that the jury spokesman has worked for Bob Woodward and been a neighbor of Tim Russert - both of whom testified in the trial.

Oh, heck, let's not make the ridiculous assumption that his connections with Woodward and Russert would have prevented him from serving on the jury with an open and unbiased mind.

 

[red states rule]

Oh, heck, let's not make the ridiculous assumption that his connections with Woodward and Russert would have prevented him from serving on the jury with an open and unbiased mind.

He will be all over the liberal Sunday shows, he will have a book deal within a few moths, he will get a reporter gig at the Nation, be offered a job as a politicial analysist at MSNBC, and he will he the toast of the liberal cocktail party circuit

No, not a hint of liberal bias here

 

[Annie]

Did it ever come out in the trial that she was actually an undercover operative - or did the jury NOT get to hear any of that?

I do like how it has now come out that the jury spokesman has worked for Bob Woodward and been a neighbor of Tim Russert - both of whom testified in the trial.

It seems he did tell that on the form he filled out. What the defense was thinking? Perhaps with the jury pool in DC, he was the best they could hope for? He had an article up at Huffington Post, nearly 8k words, right after the trial. Seems someone was writing a book while serving on a jury. I don't know if that may be grounds for an appeal?

 

[red states rule]

It seems he did tell that on the form he filled out. What the defense was thinking? Perhaps with the jury pool in DC, he was the best they could hope for? He had an article up at Huffington Post, nearly 8k words, right after the trial. Seems someone was writing a book while serving on a jury. I don't know if that may be grounds for an appeal?

While the libs are giddy over the conviction - it will not last long. I do believe this conviction will be tossed out. The Judge was very biased and the rulings were clearly slanted to help prosecution

 

[Annie]

Well there may be an upside to this, if the Justice Department would just do it:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGZlYWYwMmVhMTQ1MDhkMWY3Zjc2MWI2NzgxMTVkYTQ=

Libby [Bill Bennett]

One simple observation about the Libby trial and the celebrations by the media, the Left, and the Joe Wilsons: Now that we have established that no rock and no expense will be left unturned and unspent, that no reporter involved will be left unsubpoenaed for leaking or even purportedly leaking a classified agent's name, when we have some suspicion that a person who works at the CIA might be covert (but turns out not to be): Can we please begin the investigation and subpoenaing of journalists—also known as witnesses to a crime—for leaking classified national-security information in a time of war?!

—I'm not making a partisan point, I'm making a serious point about serious breaches of law and public endangerment; I'm not talking about disgruntled spouses with political differences with the president, I'm talking about the disclosure of the most serious war-time planning and procedures to keep our country safe. I'm talking about disclosing the secret detention facilities of high-value terrorists, I'm talking about the disclosure of terrorist surveillance programs, I'm talking about the disclosure of the Treasury Department's SWIFT program that tracked terrorist financing—all of which are now caput because insiders leaked to the press and the press willingly published these classified secrets—-NONE of the programs that were leaked were illegal, all of them were of great value, all of them are over or changed as a result of the disclosure.

—Can we please start a serious investigation of those, and by all means subpoena the witnesses, that is to say the reporters. If you can do it to nail bit players in a seemingly innocent disclosure of Valerie Plame's name where her husband started the process, then you can certainly do it over serious anti-terrorism programs that were of the highest level of classification.

—As for the import of Libby's conviction and Joe Wilson's allegations? I can't do better than Mark Steyn who wrote yesterday here on The Corner: "an anti-war deputy secretary of an anti-war department leaking to an anti-war reporter the name of an anti-war analyst who got her anti-war husband a job with an anti-war agency is supposedly an elaborate “conspiracy” by Cheney, Rove and the other warmongers. Looked at more prosaically, it’s a freak intersection of bad personnel decisions, which is one of the worst features of this presidency. So many of the Bush administration’s wounds come from its willingness to keep the wrong people in key positions: Tenet should not have been retained at the CIA, Armitage should not have been at State."

03/08 06:32 AM