Bush wipes away Libby’s prison sentence – Despite backlash, president says total pardon possible
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Bush’s move came Monday, just five hours after a federal appeals panel ruled that Libby could not delay his prison term. His prospects for an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court seemed bleak. The former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Libby was just waiting for a date to surrender.
After months of sidestepping pardon questions, Bush stepped in. He did not issue a pardon but erased a prison sentence that he felt was just too harsh. On Tuesday, Bush said a complete pardon is possible.
‘As to the future, I rule nothing in and nothing out,’ Bush said.
‘I respect the jury’s verdict,’ Bush said Monday. ‘But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend 30 months in prison.’
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald disputed the president’s assertion that the prison term was excessive. Libby was sentenced under the same laws as other criminals, Fitzgerald said. ‘It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals.’
Libby’s attorney, Theodore Wells, said in a statement that the Libby family was grateful for Bush’s action and continued to believe in his innocence.
Because he was not pardoned, Libby remains the highest-ranking White House official convicted of a crime since the Iran-Contra affair. But he won’t have to serve a day in prison, a fact that his friends cheered, even those who wished he’d received a full pardon.
Though the leak investigation is complete and nobody will have to serve prison time, the scandal that has loomed over the Bush administration for years did not subside. Democrats were enraged.
‘Libby’s conviction was the one faint glimmer of accountability for White House efforts to manipulate intelligence and silence critics of the Iraq war,’ said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. ‘Now, even that small bit of justice has been undone.’
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush’s decision showed the president ‘condones criminal conduct.’
The president left intact a $250,000 fine and two years probation for his conviction of lying and obstructing justice in a probe into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity. The former operative, Valerie Plame, contends the White House was trying to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of Bush’s Iraq policy.
Congress ought to investigate ‘whether or not the president himself is a participant in the obstruction of justice,’ Wilson told The Santa Fe New Mexican. Wilson, Plame and their children moved to Santa Fe earlier this year.
‘The president has utterly subverted the rule of law and the system of justice that has undergirded this country of ours for the past 220 years,’ Wilson said Tuesday on NBC’s ‘Today’ show.
Already at record lows in the polls, Bush risked a political backlash with his decision. President Ford tumbled in the polls after his 1974 pardon of Richard M. Nixon, and the decision was a factor in Ford’s loss in the 1976 election.
Bush’s father ‘ former President George H.W. Bush ‘ issued pardons shortly before leaving office in 1992 for former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and five other Reagan administration officials. The six were involved in the Iran-Contra affair, in which arms were secretly sold to Iran to win the freedom of American hostages, then the money was funneled to anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua despite a congressional ban on military aid.