March 6, 2007
The jury was just there for show
Former Vice Presidential aide Irve Lewis “Scooter” Libby is now a convicted felon, pending appeal. Some people seem to want to hold up this moment as some sort of triumph for law and order over the authoritarian power grabs of Our Fine President and his cadre of fanatics, but that’s not what happened today and that’s not what this trial was about exactly.
Today a jury of 11 found Scooter guilty on four of the five charges brought against him, all of them related to his fibbery before the FBI and prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury investigating the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. His attorneys vowed appeal of this outrageous conviction so that will delay him heading to prison, but what he did was never in doubt, not that this matters much either.
Scooter wont be serving time in jail. His appeals will drag on for a few years, and by the time he’s done with the process Our Fine President will be deep into his lame duck phase. Come on, after everything that’s gone on under his watch a pardon or a trusted old friend will seem almost quaint.
Scooter Libby wont be punished with jail time for his lying ways, and this trial was never about that. The jury made the right decision, but the trial had already served it’s main purpose by the time they retired to deliberate upon the evidence presented.
When Plame’s name was leaked it was done as an overt retaliation against her husband Joseph Wilson who’d recently exposed some of the mistruths told to justify the Iraq war. It would have been another run of the mill character assassination for these people expect for the pesky fact that exposing the identity of a CIA agent is a federal crime.
Fitzgerald’s investigation looked into things, and while the facts certainly showed the political machinations employed to expose Plame, the law sets the bar high and it would have been tough to win a conviction for the leak itself. But Scooter, he handed Fitzgerald a case he could prosecute. He got sloppy and pinned his alibi on a reporter who didn’t play along.
Scooter lied under oath in an effort to shield the Vice president and Karl Rove from being directly implicated in something that might not have quite been a crime anyway. Prosecuting him for such a minor transgression might seem wasteful or even spiteful, but it really wasn’t much about what Libby said or didn’t say to the grand jury.
This prosecution was all about doing what Congress has failed to do for the last six years. Patrick Fitzgerald conducted this trial not just because he knew he could get a conviction, but because he knew it could expose a few of the devious length to which the administration will go to oppress dissent.
Putting Scooter on trial was not about punishing his crime. It was about setting down a record of this administration’s misdeeds, abuses of power and arrogant leadership. Fitzgerald did as good a job at that as he could, but he didn’t quite have the power to put high level administration officials on the stand under oath.
The Justice Department just flexed its check, time for Congress to issue some subpoenas do some checking of its own.