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Libby to remain in jail BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS
timothy.phelps@newsday.com
June 15, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Just over six years ago, the newly powerful chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney was described by reporters as squirming in his chair before a House committee before which he was called to testify about the pardon of his former client, the notorious commodities trader Marc Rich.
Now it is the former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is in need of a pardon, and urgently, after federal District Court Judge Reggie Walton refused yesterday to let Libby stay out of jail while he appeals his conviction for obstructing an investigation into the CIA leak case.
And at least figuratively it is President George W. Bush -- who appointed Walton to the federal court because he was a tough sentencer -- who is squirming in his chair, deciding whether to pardon a man once so indispensable to the White House that he was described as "Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney."
Bush, now dipping below a 30 percent approval rating in some political polls, must decide whether to risk what little political capital he has left with a pardon likely to be unpopular with the general public, or risk the outraged ire of conservatives, particularly Libby's fellow neoconservatives, who are among the few who still support him.
Chief among those presumed lobbying for a Libby pardon is Cheney, one of the most powerful vice presidents in history, who called his top assistant "a man of the highest intellect, judgment and personal integrity," even after his conviction for perjury and obstructing justice in the investigation into who leaked the name of former covert CIA agent Valerie Plame to reporters in 2003. If there were any skeletons in Bush's closet, Cheney would probably be able to call them by name.
"The dilemma the president faces is whether a timely pardon will win him more support than simply throwing Scooter Libby to the wolves," said Ross Baker, an expert on the presidency at Rutgers University. "It may be there's a greater risk in the pursuance of the core loyalists like the Cheney people in the party ... It might well be argued to the president that this is something he ought to put off until the 19th of January, 2009 [his last day in office].
"This is not a single mom," Baker said. "This is an Ivy League-educated lawyer. When people like that do the perp walk I think there is just a little bit of silent rejoicing that goes on among people who never had those advantages."
But if Bush waits until he is leaving office, Libby, the protege of another fallen Bush neoconservative, outgoing World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, might already have spent nearly a year and a half out of his two-and-a-half-year sentence in jail.
The White House continued to decline to comment on whether Bush is considering a pardon. "Scooter Libby still has the right to appeal, and therefore the president will continue not to intervene in the judicial process," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
Libby is expected to file an appeal today of the decision to send him straight to jail with the Court of Appeals here. That court is in summer recess, but an emergency panel of three federal judges whose identity is for the moment a secret will consider whether Walton was right yesterday when he rejected Libby's lawyers' argument that the Plame investigation was constitutionally flawed and that Libby should have been allowed to present more evidence blocked by Walton at trial.