A Trump pardon for Scooter Libby?

Didn't George W. Bush already pardon Scooter Libby? No, Bush just commuted the 30-month prison sentence. Why is President Trump (reportedly) going to do what Bush did not?

I. Lewis Libby Jr., VP Dick Cheney's chief of staff, "was convicted of four felonies in 2007 for perjury before a grand jury, lying to F.B.I. investigators and obstruction of justice during an investigation into the disclosure of the work of Valerie Plame Wilson, a C.I.A. officer.... Mr. Libby was not charged with the leak itself and has long argued that his conviction rested on an innocent difference in memories between him and several witnesses, not an intent to deceive investigators."

Mr. Libby’s case has long been a cause for conservatives who maintained that he was a victim of a special prosecutor run amok, an argument that may have resonated with the president. Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that the special counsel investigation into possible cooperation between his campaign and Russia in 2016 has gone too far and amounts to an unfair “witch hunt.”...

Victoria Toensing thinks Patrick Fitzgerald should can the emotional theatrics.

It's not right for a prosecutor to express his outrage, she says:

... Justice Department guidelines [say] that prior to trial a "prosecutor shall refrain from making extrajudicial comments that pose a serious and imminent threat of heightening public condemnation of the accused." The prosecutor is permitted to "inform the public of the nature and extent" of the charges. In the vernacular of all of us who practice criminal law, that means the prosecutor may not go "beyond the four corners" -- the specific facts -- in the complaint or indictment...

Fitzgerald said what Blagojevich did "would make Lincoln roll over in his grave" and so forth. Clearly, inappropriate, according to Toensing, who seems to think Fitzgerald was emboldened by the adulation he received in the media over the way he treated Scooter Libby:

In his news conference in October 2005 announcing the indictment of Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice, he compared himself to an umpire who "gets sand thrown in his eyes." The umpire is "trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked" his view. With this statement, Mr. Fitzgerald made us all believe he could not find the person who leaked Valerie Plame's name as a CIA operative because of Mr. Libby. What we all now know is that Mr. Fitzgerald knew well before he ever started the investigation in January 2004 that Richard Armitage was the leaker and nothing Mr. Libby did or did not do threw sand in his eyes. In fact -- since there was no crime -- there was not even a game for the umpire to call.

In the Libby case, rather than suffer criticism, Mr. Fitzgerald became a media darling. And so in the Blagojevich case he returned to the microphone. Throughout the press conference about Gov. Blagojevich, Mr. Fitzgerald talked beyond the four corners of the complaint. He repeatedly characterized the conduct as "appalling." He opined that the governor "has taken us to a new low," while going on a "political corruption crime spree."

Let's get back to super-square prosecutors -- confined by the four corners.

Minutes after we hear that their notes make the jurors seem confused, the verdict is in.

Here's the piece about the confused-sounding notes.

In their questions, which were released Tuesday morning, jurors seemed confused about what Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was alleging.

Were prosecutors saying Libby knew that Plame worked for the CIA by the time of his FBI interview, jurors asked? Was he accused of lying to Cooper? Or does the government believe Libby's account of the Cooper conversation was untrue?

Walton tried to clarify things.

"To be clear, Mr. Libby is charged in Count Three with making false statements to the FBI about what was said during his July 12, 2003 conversation with Mr. Cooper," Walton wrote in response. "Mr. Libby is not charged with making a false statement to Mr. Cooper."

The reading of the verdict is scheduled for noon, Eastern Time.

UPDATE: I'm watching the CNN Pipeline, "Awaiting Libby Verdict." We overhear the journalists chatting as they mill around off camera. One guy stays in the frame. He's got a Burberry scarf all twirled around his neck and lower face. How cold is it in D.C. anyway? Oh, good Lord, he just put on a wool hat. Hmmm... I see it's 26°. "I did it. I'm guilty. I'd do it again." I hear someone -- not the scarf guy -- say. Ooh, I guess I'm "live-blogging" as they say.

"Guilty on 4 out of 5 counts," someone says. Are they predicting or hearing? They are hearing.

"You cannot say that it is unimportant and something you forgot."

Says Richard A. Sauber (lawyer for Time's Matthew Cooper), explaining the relationship between the new revelations (that Scooter Libby took part in authorized disclosures to controvert war critic Joe Wilson) and Libby's defense to perjury (that he forgot who said what about Wilson's wife Valerie Plame).

Meanwhile, Libby's lawyer, William Jeffress, says the special prosecutor's revelation "is a complete sidelight" to the charge against his client, that "It's got nothing to do with Wilson's wife."

Fitzgerald's filing was meant specifically to undermine Libby's claim that the issue of the CIA's employment of Plame was of "peripheral" interest to Libby at the time. He said in the filing that leaks regarding Plame were meant to embarrass Wilson by suggesting his wife had organized a CIA-sponsored trip by Wilson to probe Iraq's alleged purchase of nuclear material -- in short, to suggest his trip resulted from nepotism.

Fitzgerald argued, in essence, that the White House effort to rebut Wilson's criticism was so intense, and so preoccupying, that Libby could not have forgotten what he said about Plame. Fitzgerald also noted that Plame's employment was specifically raised as a relevant matter by Cheney, who had directed Libby to disclose information from the NIE.

Even if the two subjects have something to do with each other, the question is how much weight this evidence has. How do you prove someone is lying when they say they forgot? One way is to prove this is the sort of thing you could not have forgotten because of its connection with something else you were paying intensely close attention to.

Quite aside from the prosecution of Scooter Libby are the charges that President Bush was hypocritical for declassifying information to support the war when he has been critical of the unauthorized leaking of information:

[T]he report that the president was himself approving a leak may do serious political damage, said [historian Rick] Shenkman, who has a blog on presidential politics. "It does give the public such a powerful example of hypocrisy that I think it might linger for a while," he said.

Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman, disputed the charge of a double standard on leaks. "There is a difference between declassifying information in the national interest and the unauthorized disclosure" of national security information, Mr. McClellan said Friday. Of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, part of which Mr. Libby shared with Judith Miller, then a Times reporter, Mr. McClellan said, "There was nothing in there that would compromise national security."

Mr. McClellan's tone contrasted sharply with that of administration officials after the N.S.A. story broke in December. Mr. Bush told a news conference at the time: "My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."

Others picked up the theme, including Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director. On Feb. 2, Mr. Goss told a Senate committee, "It is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information."

I hope people will be able to keep these stories straight, but they are complicated and likely to merge, which is, of course, what Bush's critics want.

I am a hypocrite...

But so are you.

Except that I'm not. Still, thanks for admitting that you are!

The subject: the on-and-off concern about national security, when looking at the domestic surveillance controversy and the Plame investigation, depending on where the partisan political advantage seems to lie.

The admission: from Ted of Crooked Timber, who cries gotcha on me.

The proof that I haven't taken two sides on the two controversies:

Re Plame, I've said:

I have avoided writing [about] the Plame story. There is too much detail to it for me to analyze it and come to a fair conclusion. A man faces criminal prosecution. The temptation is to say either this is a huge deal or this is practically nothing based on how much you'd like to see the Bush Administration wounded. How many bloggers have fallen prey to that temptation? How many bloggers have written about the indictment of I. Lewis Libby without imbuing it with their own political wishes? A man faces criminal prosecution. Let him go to trial, then.

Re domestic surveillance, I've consistently avoided pronouncements about the statutory law and how it relates to the constitutional law on the ground that it is too specialized and complicated. For example, in the long set of comments to this post, I chided a commenter who asserted that the surveillance program was "blatantly" illegal:

You might note that I haven't taken a position. I don't consider myself knowledgable enough to do so, and I really dislike it when other people think they are. Look how modest Kerr was about his analysis. He's an expert, and he still refrained from making any strong assertions. Take a lesson from that.

Later, in the same thread, responding to a commenter who wondered how I could miss some aspect of the FISA statute, I said:

How could I miss it? Simple: I've never even purported to analyze the statute. I can see it's complex, and I've never studied it. I've just chided people who are jumping ahead and saying what it means. I'm not myself doing the thing I'm chiding others for doing.

Shamelessly stripping this post of mine of its context, Ted says "Ann Althouse couldn't care less about Valerie Plame." That post is about the way people like Kos were exulting about "Fitz-mas." I was expressing disgust about "slavering hyenas" gloating about the indictments they hoped to get from the special prosecutor. I wasn't saying I didn't care about that leak. Not there or anywhere else! I await Ted's apology for his self-serving distortion of my writing.

Ted also tries to excuse the leaking of classified information in the domestic surveillance matter on the ground that it's whistleblowing. To that, I've already said (in the comments at the last link):

You can't reveal national security secrets and just say you're a whistleblower. The leak is really outrageous, and people who don't care about it strike me as flat-out partisans who care more about politics than national security. It's quite sickening.

I agree that the Plame leak may have been devoid of any virtuous motive, but that's beside the point. The question is: Are you concerned, in a politically neutral way, about national security? Ted tries to wriggle out of this question by just observing that he isn't seeing the damage to national security and telling me that I ought to prove the damage to national security. That's ridiculous. It's not for each person in possession of classified information to decide for himself how much it matters and to weigh how much good could be done by leaking it. And for those of us on the outside, who don't know the true scope of the program or the terrorist activities, we have no basis to spout off about how damaging the leak was. Blithe yammering about how it didn't really hurt just makes you look all the more partisan.