Libby decision draws criticism, confusion
WASHINGTON – President Bush held out the possibility Tuesday that he eventually may pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby as the White House sought to fend off Democratic outrage and conservative disappointment over the president’s decision to commute the 30-month prison term of the vice president’s former chief of staff.
A day after he intervened to keep Libby out of prison, Bush refused to reject the idea of issuing a full pardon, which some conservatives have been urging him to grant. A pardon would erase the four felony convictions Libby received for lying to federal investigators about his role in a White House leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity.
“As to the future,” the president told reporters, “I rule nothing in or nothing out.”
Meanwhile, the federal judge who presided over one of the most high-profile Washington trials in years said Tuesday that the elimination of Libby’s prison term calls into question another part of Libby’s sentence.
When Bush announced his decision Monday evening, he emphasized that Libby still faced what the president characterized as a “harsh” sentence, and noted that he was leaving in place a $250,000 fine and two years of supervised probation. Tuesday, however, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, a Bush appointee, filed a court order saying that federal law “does not appear to contemplate a situation in which a defendant may be placed under supervised release without first completing a term of incarceration.”
Walton asked prosecutors and defense lawyers to tell the court by Monday how they think the matter should be handled.
As the judge tried to sort through the legal fallout, congressional Democrats began to mine the political consequences of the president’s action. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., announced a hearing next week to explore what he called “the presidential authority to grant clemency and how such power may be abused.”
“Taken to its extreme,” he said, “the use of such authority could completely circumvent the law enforcement process and prevent credible efforts to investigate wrongdoing in the executive branch.”
Libby, a 56-year-old lawyer, was Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide and a key figure in forging the administration’s foreign policy until he was indicted in 2005. He was the only person charged in a three-year federal investigation, led by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, of whether any administration officials broke the law when they leaked to reporters the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame. No one was charged with the leak itself.
Defense lawyers and experts on federal sentencing guidelines said the president’s actions are at odds with the administration’s position on federal sentencing guidelines. The Bush Justice Department has opposed attempts to impose sentences more lenient than the guidelines call for, even in cases involving white-collar criminals with no criminal history, such as Libby.
“On the one hand, you have the administration taking the position in every federal sentencing that a guidelines sentence should be imposed,” said Barry Boss, a Washington defense lawyer and former co-chairman of the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s Practitioners Advisory Group. “And then you have President Bush saying in his statement that the guidelines are too harsh.”