Notes From D.R. | Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene

Maybe the folks who regarded President Bush as unfit for command were on to something.

The new TIME article chronicling former Vice President Cheney’s fruitless effort to encourage Bush to pardon convicted White House aide I. Lewis Libby is a harsh indictment of our most recent ex-Commander-in-Chief. Bush, who began his White House tenure posing as a “compassionate conservative,” revealed himself to be a man with a heart of stone in the final days of his administration, failing to deliver aid to Libby as the waters of legal controversy threatened to submerge him.

As reporters Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf note, “This Libby-pardon fight…began two years earlier, in the federal district courthouse in Washington. In a case that gripped the capital but often mystified the rest of the country, Cheney’s former top aide on domestic and foreign policy stood accused of obstructing a federal investigation into the source of an egregious media leak: the identity of an undercover CIA officer named Valerie Plame. Her husband Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat, had written an Op-Ed for the New York Times in July 2003 claiming to have evidence that the Administration had lied to bolster the case for war in Iraq. Within days, in an effort to discredit Wilson’s story, a conservative columnist [Robert Novak] had revealed the identify of Wilson’s wife. Plame’s ‘outing’ was seen by her husband and his fellow Democrats as an act of revenge orchestrated by Cheney himself — and the most extreme example of how far an Administration would go to cover its tracks in a war gone bad.

“Libby maintained his innocence throughout his trial, claiming that any false statements he had made to investigators resulted from bad memory, not deception…Bush had declared that anyone involved in leaking Plame’s identity would be fired. Cheney had personally assured Bush early on that his aide wasn’t involved, even persuading the President to exonerate Libby publicly through a spokesman.”

In March 2007, Libby was convicted on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to federal investigators. Three months later, Libby was sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison and a $250,000 fine; right before the Fourth of July, Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence. However, Libby’s felony conviction stood in the way of his ability to resume his career as a lawyer and to regain his reputation, obviously damaged by Washington’s politics of personal destruction.

Cheney, wanting his former aide to be made whole, pushed for a Bush pardon of Libby. Unfortunately, his efforts were doomed. According to Calabresi and Weisskopf, “Bush had long approached pardons with suspicion. As Texas governor, he granted them sparingly. His reluctance stemmed not from a lack of mercy but from his sense that pardons were a rigged game, tilted in favor of offenders with political connections.” Bush was apparently uninterested in the idea that Libby deserved a pardon precisely because he was the victim of a rigged game, a White House mouse caught in a perjury trap.

In a January 2009 Oval Office meeting with Bush, Cheney “…made his points in a calm, lawyerly style, saying Libby was a fall guy for critics of the Iraq war, a loyal team player caught up in a political dispute that never should have turned into a legal matter. They went after Scooter, Cheney would say, because they couldn’t get his boss.” However, Bush wasn’t buying this argument; he seemed to legitimately believe that Libby had intentionally lied under oath, despite Libby’s insistence that a weak memory, not a determination to deceive, resulted in sworn statements judged to be untrue. “A few days later, about a week before they would become private citizens, Bush pulled Cheney aside after a morning meeting and told him there would be no pardon. Cheney looked stricken. Most officials respond to a presidential rebuff with a polite thanks for considering the request in the first place. But Cheney, an observer says, ‘expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the decision … He didn’t take it well.’”

One day after Bush ceded control of the White House to Barack Obama, Cheney used polite words to lash out at Bush, telling the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes: “Scooter Libby is one of the most capable and honorable men I’ve ever known. He’s been an outstanding public servant throughout his career. He was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice, and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush’s decision.” According to Hayes, “Bush’s decision not to pardon Libby has angered many of the president’s strongest defenders. One Libby sympathizer, a longtime defender of Bush, told friends she was ‘disgusted’ by the president. Another described Bush as ‘dishonorable’ and a third suggested that refusing to pardon Libby was akin to leaving a soldier on the battlefield. They believe that the prosecution of Libby was riddled with inconsistencies and double-standards. Not least of those is the fact that former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who leaked the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame to at least two reporters, was never charged. And Fitzgerald had known from the outset of his investigation that Armitage was the leaker.

“Others, including some who believe it’s possible that Libby did lie to the grand jury, argue that Libby should have been pardoned because his conviction came as a result of highly-charged political fight between the Wilson, the CIA, and the Bush administration. The entire chain of events that led to Libby’s conviction started with a lie from Joseph Wilson, Plame’s husband, who claimed to have debunked forged documents related to intelligence reports on Iraq, Niger and uranium. But Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to investigate the reports after his wife recommended him, could not have discredited the reports as forgeries because the U.S. government did not yet possess them at the time he made his trip.” Hayes further notes: “Two sources believe that the White House was concerned with public relations and simply did not want to defend or justify a Libby pardon.”

Bush’s failure to pardon Libby was more than just dishonorable: it was immoral. Libby did not deserve to have his reputation permanently damaged because of his involvement in “Plamegate.” If Bush actually refused to grant Libby a pardon because he was afraid of what the media would say, history should label him a coward.

No, Dick Cheney will never win the Mr. Congeniality award, but if TIME’s account of his efforts to help Libby is accurate, he’s more of a man than Bush ever was. Cheney saw a wrong and tried to right it; Bush saw a wrong and said, “Oh, well.”

While conservatives are upset by Obama’s actions as President, they shouldn’t forget that it was Bush’s foolishness and poor judgment that allowed the Hope and Change Express to arrive at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Bush’s decision not to pardon Libby after his conviction on trumped-up charges was unconscionable, the act of a President gone mad. Hard as it is for a partisan conservative to admit, the left’s 2000 assessment of the Bush-Cheney ticket was largely true: Cheney was the adult, the one with gravitas, the one who would keep things together. Sadly, for Libby and for all of us, he was not the one with all the power.