More on the Marc Rich pardon vis a vis the Libby commutation

in a post earlier today, stop defending clinton, i was probably not as clear as i might have been about my criticism of bill clinton... let me say right off the bat, in no way whatsoever am i qualified to comment on the legalities or the process followed by bill clinton in his pardon of marc rich, nor, by the same token, am i qualified to comment on those same aspects of george bush's commutation of scooter libby's sentence... but i CAN comment on something else, something i believe is more important...

forget about the legalities, forget about executive powers of clemency, and forget about the validity of the charges - in the case of rich, or the conviction - in the case of libby... there is something more fundamental that no one is addressing... more than any other elected or appointed public official, the president of the united states should be expected to avoid even the APPEARANCE of impropriety... i don't want to hear reasons, i don't want to be subjected to finely-honed legal arguments... clinton's pardon of rich and bush's commutation of libby's sentence both reek of impropriety, and, therefore, they had no business doing either...

jeralyn, in her ususal cogent, lawyerly way, does a careful, point-by-point comparison of the two situations, but neglects to mention that BOTH presidents INVITED the uproar that followed their decisions... BOTH clinton AND bush made decisions that, given their connections with the two individuals in question, shouldn't have even been considered, and that, to me, is the entire issue in a nutshell... if it's going to be perceived as a compromise of your ethics, why would you want to do it in the first place...? i think we've got a pretty good idea why george let libby off the hook, but clinton was no less heedless of the fallout from his pardon of rich...

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Stop defending Clinton

.
Scooter Libby.......................Marc Rich

the virtually unquestioned article of faith in most of the liberal/progressive blogosphere goes like this...

Bush = bad; Clinton = good

it really should be more like this...

Bush = evil; Clinton = bad

the latest tortured response to yet another of the r's whiney, "well, clinton did it TOO," b.s. revolving around clinton's pardon of marc rich and 210 others in his last 9 weeks in office, is a case in point... today's progress report takes on tony snow, arguably a more adept purveyor of lies than scotty mcclellan, who, in a usa today op-ed, tries to justify bush's making a mockery of the entire american justice system... snow 1) minimizes the egregiousness of bush's action by noting the president's plenary constitutional powers (another subliminal plug for the unitary executive), and 2) makes the usual comparison with bill clinton... snow argues that since bush was acting in accordance with his executive powers, and that there was little investigation of clinton's pardons, why should bush be taking heat for commuting libby's sentence... the progress report rebuts by pointing out that "federal prosecutors concluded 'it wasn't appropriate to bring charges' in [Clinton's] case"...

dems, liberals and progressives need to stop defending bill clinton... just because he's a democrat, working overtime to make him look good doesn't add one whit to democratic credibility... it would be a LOT more honest to point out that clinton was acting within the same corrupt system that's still in place, and certainly held up his end by keeping it going for his eight years in office... the LAST myth we need to foster is that everything is going to be different when a democratic president takes office on 20 january 2009...

also, let's keep some of the facts on marc rich out in the open... while rich didn't obstruct an investigation into the outing of a cia agent and, on top of that, lie about it, rich isn't exactly a candidate for sainthood either...

marc rich...

In 1983, Rich and partner Pincus Green were indicted by U.S. Attorney and future mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani, on charges of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran. Both of them fled to Switzerland before a court appearance, and they remained on the FBI's Most Wanted List for many years.

On January 20, 2001, hours before leaving office, President Bill Clinton granted Rich a presidential pardon. Since Rich's former wife and mother of his three children, socialite Denise Rich, had made large donations to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Library during Clinton's time in office, Clinton's critics alleged that Rich's pardon had been bought. Rich had also made substantial donations to Israeli charitable foundations. Clinton explained his decision by noting that similar situations were settled in civil, not criminal court, and cited clemency pleas from Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Federal Prosecutor Mary Jo White was appointed to investigate. She stepped down before the investigation was finished and was replaced by James Comey. Though Comey was critical of Clinton's pardons, he could not find any grounds on which to indict him.

During hearings after Rich's pardon, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who had represented Rich from 1985 until the spring of 2000, denied that Rich had violated the tax laws, but criticized him for trading with Iran at a time when that country was holding U.S. hostages. In his letter to the New York Times, Bill Clinton explained why he pardoned Rich, noting that U.S. tax professors Bernard Wolfman of Harvard Law School and Martin Ginsburg of Georgetown University Law Center concluded that no crime was committed, and that the companies' tax reporting position was reasonable. [New York Times, February 18, 2001][2]. In the same letter Clinton listed Libby as one of three "distinguished Republican lawyers" who supported Rich's pardon.

what we really need to face as a country is that we've got rot sprinkled liberally (pardon the very bad pun) throughout our government... it's become almost impossible to separate out the wheat from the chaff, but it's obvious as hell that there's enough power in congressional leadership to keep the status quo going for a very long time, and that's not even mentioning the horror that is the bush administration and their puppet makeover that is now our supreme court...

thanks to the daily show, here's a photo of the bed all these people sleep in...

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"Pissing on your leg and telling you it's raining"

kagro x...

[F]ollowing George W. Bush's pardon (let's be honest) of Scooter Libby, a Republican's admonition to let anything play out in court ought to be regarded as worth exactly squat.

So long as George W. Bush wields the pardon pen, there are no courts. And any Republican who tells you otherwise is pissing on your leg and telling you it's raining.

the ramifications of bush's commutation of libby's sentence are so huge, i'm still attempting to digest them... i've obviously still got a lot more digestin' to do...

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Hunter waxes eloquent on the Libby deal

and, believe me, nobody, and i mean NOBODY, can wax eloquent like hunter...

a teaser...

When seeking clemency for a criminal obstruction of justice, it is always considered a stroke of luck to have committed the obstruction on behalf of individuals with the power to grant such clemency.

read it all...

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Bush and Cheney must resign

keith olbermann, as usual, doesn't mince words... the pressure is building...



(thanks to crooks and liars... click here...)

i've been calling for bush and cheney and the entire cabinet to resign since i sat in front of my television set in buenos aires, in tears, watching the katrina disaster unfold... i never thought they would last this long, but, now it's time... they need to go...

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The previous post is even more important in light of THIS!

i'm tellin' ya, BURY THEM IN EMAILS... OVERLOAD THEIR INBOXES... TELL 'EM HOW YOU REALLY FEEL ABOUT HAVING CRIMINALS RUNNING THIS COUNTRY...

Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. announced that he will be holding a full committee hearing next week titled, "The Use and Misuse of Presidential Clemency Power for Executive Branch Officials." The hearing will be held next Wednesday, July 11, at 10:15 am in the committee’s hearing room, 2141 Rayburn House Office Building.

"In light of yesterday’s announcement by the President that he was commuting the prison sentence for Scooter Libby, it is imperative that Congress look into presidential authority to grant clemency, and how such power may be abused," Conyers said. "Taken to its extreme, the use of such authority could completely circumvent the law enforcement process and prevent credible efforts to investigate wrongdoing in the executive branch."

MAKE THIS THE TIPPING POINT...! I THINK WE CAN DO IT...! THE TIME IS NOW...!

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The usual suspects weigh in with totally predictable opinions on Libby

there was a knock on my door late last evening... it was my daughter-in-law's mom coming to tell me in shocked tones that bush had commuted libby's sentence... not the most excitable of people and not, by any stretch, a news or politics junkie, she had been watching local news on a san francisco station and evidently the news announcers there were reporting bush's decision in thinly veiled outrage (not inappropriately, imho)... anyway, she was unusually agitated, which, i suspect, is a good thing... maybe it's starting to sink in to those among us who are not as news and politics-obsessed that we have a situation in this country that is seriously out of control...

from today's wapo editorialist...

The WaPo argues that President Bush's decision to commute Scooter Libby's entire prison sentence "sends the wrong message about the seriousness" of his offense. "We agree that a pardon would have been inappropriate and that the prison sentence of 30 months was excessive," the editors write. "But reducing the sentence to no prison time at all, as Mr. Bush did -- to probation and a large fine -- is not defensible" ... under the headline "Soft on Crime," the NYT argues that President Bush's decision underscores "the way this president is tough on crime when it's committed by common folk." The editors write that when the president was explaining his decision, he "did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice. He sounded like a man worried about what a former loyalist might say when actually staring into a prison cell" ... the Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, argues that the president didn't go far enough. By "failing to issue a full pardon," the editors write, "Mr. Bush is evading responsibility for the role his Administration played in letting the Plame affair build into fiasco and, ultimately, this personal tragedy" ... NYT columnist David Brooks argues that Bush's decision to commute Libby's sentence was "exactly right." "It punishes him for his perjury, but not for the phantasmagorical political farce that grew to surround him. It takes away his career, but not his family."

i'd summarize some of the more ridiculous and heavily spun verbiage for you, but you can do that for yourselves in 10-second eyeballing of the above...

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Is that the sound of an iron door closing behind Scooter that I hear?

the appeals panel evidently sees things the same way that reggie and fitz do...

happy 4th of july, scooter...

"In an order handed down Monday, a three judge panel wrote Libby 'has not shown that the appeal raises a substantial question' that regular appeals court will consider when its next term begins in September."

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has not set a date for Libby to report to jail. CNN added that Libby could still seek relief from the Supreme Court.

now we get to see if george is going to cave to the elites who fear the same fate and grant him a pardon...

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Clemency for Libby: "the hedonistic pleasure of political expediency"

from the politico...

A well-connected Republican whose views have reached Bush’s inner circle said that if Libby goes to prison, “It would be seen by the religious and policy conservatives as the president abandoning his loyalty virtue for the hedonistic pleasure of political expediency.”

have you ever in your life read such an odoriferous pile of steaming multi-syllabic horseshit...? "the hedonistic pleasure of political expediency...?" unbelievable that those words could actually be uttered by a living, breathing human being... whoever the "well-connected republican" was who mouthed those words could only have been orgasmic at the time... nothing else could explain it...

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Bill Moyers for President

i could have sworn i posted this the other day, but, when i went looking for it, it wasn't there... anyway, here it is again, from one of the very best u.s. media has to offer...

Begging His Pardon

by Bill Moyers

We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington's ruling clique of neoconservative elites—the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.

It is well known that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby—once Vice President Cheney’s most trusted adviser—has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie. Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice.

Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places—including his boss Dick Cheney—outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand in the eyes of truth. "Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered,” wrote the chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton—a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush—called the evidence “overwhelming” and threw the book at Libby.

You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge's chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to “free Scooter.”

Vice President Cheney issued a statement praising Libby as “a man…of personal integrity”—without even a hint of irony about their collusion to browbeat the CIA into mangling intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the invasion.

“A patriot, a dedicated public servant, a strong family man, and a tireless, honorable, selfless human being,” said Donald Rumsfeld—the very same Rumsfeld who had claimed to know the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction and who boasted of “bulletproof” evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. “A good person” and “decent man,” said the one-time Pentagon adviser Kenneth Adelman, who had predicted the war in Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” Paul Wolfowitz wrote a four-page letter to praise “the noblest spirit of selfless service” that he knew motivated his friend Scooter. Yes, that Paul Wolfowitz, who had claimed Iraqis would “greet us as liberators” and that Iraq would “finance its own reconstruction.” The same Paul Wolfowitz who had to resign recently as president of the World Bank for using his office to show favoritism to his girlfriend. Paul Wolfowitz turned character witness.

The praise kept coming: from Douglas Feith, who ran the Pentagon factory of disinformation that Cheney and Libby used to brainwash the press; from Richard Perle, as cocksure about Libby’s “honesty, integrity, fairness and balance” as he had been about the success of the war; and from William Kristol, who had primed the pump of the propaganda machine at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and has led the call for a Presidential pardon. “The case was such a farce, in my view,” he said. “I’m for pardon on the merits.”

One beltway insider reports that the entire community is grieving—“weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness” of Libby's sentence.

And there’s the rub.

None seem the least weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness of sentencing soldiers to repeated and longer tours of duty in a war induced by deception. It was left to the hawkish academic Fouad Ajami to state the matter baldly. In a piece published on the editorial page of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Ajami pleaded with Bush to pardon Libby. For believing “in the nobility of this war,” wrote Ajami, Scooter Libby had himself become a “casualty”—a fallen soldier the President dare not leave behind on the Beltway battlefield.

Not a word in the entire article about the real fallen soldiers. The honest-to-God dead, and dying, and wounded. Not a word about the chaos or the cost. Even as the calamity they created worsens, all they can muster is a cry for leniency for one of their own who lied to cover their tracks.

There are contrarian voices: “This is an open and shut case of perjury and obstruction of justice,” said Pat Buchanan. “The Republican Party stands for the idea that high officials should not be lying to special investigators.” From the former Governor of Virginia, James Gilmore, a staunch conservative, comes this verdict: “If the public believes there’s one law for a certain group of people in high places and another law for regular people, then you will destroy the law and destroy the system.”

So it may well be, as THE HARTFORD COURANT said editorially, that Mr Libby is “a nice guy, a loyal and devoted patriot…but none of that excuses perjury or obstruction of justice. If it did, truth wouldn’t matter much.”

going back to a comment from the late, great, much-missed molly ivins from july 2006...

Dear desperate Democrats, here's what we do. We run Bill Moyers for president. I am serious as a stroke about this. It's simple, cheap and effective, and it will move the entire spectrum of political discussion in this country. Moyers is the only public figure who can take the entire discussion and shove it toward moral clarity just by being there.

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"Baseball... been berry berry good... to me."

"Baseball... been berry berry good... to me." - Garrett Morris as Chico Escuela on SNL, as spoken to "Hane" Curtin

glenn greenwald expresses the same view about the "pardon scooter libby fever" i've been peddling lately (here and here)...

"Beltway crime" is an oxymoron, at least when it is committed by a high-level political official. In exactly the way they treated all prior acts of lawbreaking by Bush officials as innocuous political controversies, the Beltway press speaks of Lewis Libby's felonies as being something other than a "real crime," all so plainly based on the premise that Libby -- as a dignified member in good standing of the elevated and all-important Beltway court -- ought to be exempt from the type of punishment doled out to "real criminals" who commit "real crimes."

[...]

There are many reasons why the political press fails to investigate and uncover real wrongdoing on the part of the government, but a leading reason is that they do not see lawbreaking as genuinely wrong or the lawbreakers as corrupt. These are their friends and colleagues -- their socioeconomic peers and, with increasing and disturbing frequency, their spouses and family members -- and while Important Bush Officials might be "guilty" of engaging in harmless and perfectly accepted political "hardball," they are never genuinely bad people engaged in genuinely bad acts. And they certainly do not belong in criminal courtrooms or prison.

[...]

There is no class of people more defensive of the prerogatives of political power than our "journalist" class, even though, in a healthy and functioning democracy, the exact opposite would be true.

as i've said before, why would those who have worked so hard for their success repudiate the very system that bestowed it on them...?

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According to Novak, Bush is losing 2x with the R's, on both Gonzales and Libby

the r's think it's outrageous that bush isn't pardoning libby and even more outraged that he's retaining gonzo... at least they're thinking straight on that last one... tough shit, george... just add 'em to the list of people who hate you...

novak in the wapo today...

Washington lawyer Victoria Toensing: "If the president can pardon 12 million illegal immigrants, he can pardon Scooter Libby."

[...]

In contrast, Republican insiders are enraged by Bush's retention of Gonzales, whom they consider a political and governmental disaster.

and so, simply put, here's what novak says the r's want (never admitting, of course, that it's what HE wants too)...

[T]wo possibilities are talked about in Republican circles: Let Gonzales go, and pardon Libby. That might push Bush's approval ratings even lower, but it sure would hearten his base.

good god, the man is so out of touch...! first of all, if the r's REALLY wanted gonzo gone, they wouldn't be ready - as they are at this very moment - to scuttle the gonzo no-confidence vote... and even though george, via tony snow, said yesterday that gonzo's going to stay no matter what, they could at least go on the record strongly in opposition to keeping him... but, as i've said, they're not going to do that because they know intuitively that, like jericho, if they cut the cord now, the walls will definitely come a'tumblin' down (see previous post)...

i won't go in to the pardoning of libby other than to say that doing so would be a complete perversion of our justice system... but the other thing that blows me away is the suggestion that bush should try to appease his base even if it means he falls further in the polls... who the hell IS the base these days...? the religious right has pulled away, rightly so after being dumped by the side of the road, so novak must be referring to the likes of fouad ajami, or robert bork and his 8 other constitutional lawyers politically-connected elite buds, who not only can see themselves in libby's shoes, but are also preparing the ground for possible similar action on cheney's behalf... what novak doesn't mention, either because it hasn't occurred to him or because he's blind to the degree to which this elite "base" will try to game the system, is that bush, by pardoning libby, might also be assuring a pardon for himself later on...

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Oooooow, WOULDN'T it be loverly...!

yeah, i know... here i go, grasping at straws, but a guy's gotta DREAM, right...?

According to MSNBC's David Shuster, legal sources say that if I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is convicted for perjury and obstruction, prosecutors may try to get him to turn over evidence against the Vice President.

"Legal sources confirm to MSNBC tonight that if Libby is convicted, prosecutors are expected to attempt to revisit Libby’s vague testimony about Vice President Cheney," Shuster said. "The idea is that prosecutors would seek to flip Libby to get at suspicions about the Vice President."

"Prosecutors are still seeking to pursue Cheney in the overall investigation," he added.

The X factor in the case is whether if Libby is convicted he will be pardoned by President Bush -- in which case all bets are off.

if libby's convicted, bush will probably sign a pardon faster than he signed the terry schiavo bill, cuz if libby DID flip on cheney, the wolves would start closing in on george's ass right quick...

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