10 MARCH 2007, Page 16

If Bush is a man of his word, he will pardon Libby

The conviction of Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff is a disaster for the Republican party, says James Forsyth. But the President must recognise the loyalty that Libby has shown It is hard to imagine how things could be worse for the Bush administration. Sixty-three per cent of Americans disapprove of the job the President is doing. The shameful state of veterans’ healthcare has just been exposed. A row over the firing of eight US attorneys is threatening to turn into yet another major scandal. And the Iraq war is far from won. Now, Scooter Libby, a man who was until 18 months ago one of the administration’s most senior members, has been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Yet things could actually be a lot worse for the administration — if it had not been for Libby’s loyalty. That’s why Bush supporters are arguing that the President should pardon him.

This might sound like a bizarre argument. Libby, who was Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, has been convicted of lying to the FBI and a grand jury, and of obstructing the investigation into the leak of a CIA officer’s identity. Indeed, Libby’s conviction has already been seized upon by Bush’s many critics in both Britain and the United States as final proof that the administration is inherently duplicitous. But if Libby had wanted it to be, the trial could have been much more damaging for the Bush administration and much less so for him. A Who’s Who of the Bush White House might have been forced to take the witness stand and provide covering fire for Scooter.

Washington being Washington, a juror emerged immediately after the verdict to talk about how the jury arrived at their decision. He said that despite the jury finding Libby guilty, they were surprised he was on trial at all. As the juror put it, ‘It was said a number of times, “What are we doing with this guy here?”’ This is a very good question, to which there isn’t an easy answer. The whole investigation dates back to the conservative columnist Bob Novak revealing in July 2003 that ‘Valerie Plame is a [Central Intelligence] Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction’. The reason this fact was of interest was because her husband, the former diplomat Joseph Wilson, had claimed in an article for the New York Times that the Bush administration knew its claim that Saddam Hussein had bought uranium from Niger was highly dubious. He wrote that on a trip to Niger in 2002 he found no evidence to support these claims. Yet Bush still declared in his 2003 State of the Union address that ‘the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa’. Novak reported that, ‘Two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger.’ Novak’s revelation that Valerie Plame was a spook set off a firestorm of criticism. It was alleged that the Bush administration had committed a crime by deliberately revealing the identity of a CIA agent. So in September 2003 the Justice Department launched an investigation and subsequently appointed special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate.

We now know that the two administration figures Novak was referring to were the then deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage and Bush’s political guru Karl Rove. We still do not know if Plame was actually a covert agent or not and thus whether there was a crime to investigate in the first place or not.

So how on earth did Scooter Libby end up on trial? It was, as always, the coverup, stupid. The most logical explanation for Libby’s actions is that he was protecting his boss, Dick Cheney. It was Cheney who cut Wilson’s article out of the New York Times with his penknife and scrawled questions on it about whether Wilson had, in effect, been sent on a holiday by his wife. Even before that, Cheney had been one of the first people to tell Libby that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. Libby’s readiness to put his boss’s interests ahead of his own throughout the case culminated in his defence team’s decision not to call Cheney to testify at the trial.

Realistically, Libby’s hopes of not going to jail depend on a pardon. His team plans to appeal, but Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has followed the case extremely closely, argues that a new trial is unlikely as it is hard to see what grounds there are for one.

Pardoning Libby would be politically difficult for Bush. A pardon would seem to confirm that the Bush administration views itself as unaccountable and above the law. It would push Bush’s poll ratings even lower and provide the Democrats who greeted the verdict with instant demands that Bush rule out the possibility of a pardon — with an easy cudgel with which to beat the administration.

Moreover, a Libby pardon would be taken as evidence of Cheney’s continuing dominance in the Bush administration. There is little doubt that Cheney will lobby hard for it — after all, Libby was not only his chief of staff but appears to have thrown himself in front of a bus for the boss. But the Bush family has a history of granting pardons. Bush Senior pardoned a whole slew of people involved in the Iran-Contra affair towards the end of his presidency, even before some of them had been tried.

The irony of the whole ‘Plamegate’ fiasco is that it has left everyone dissatisfied. Liberals became convinced that the investigation would result in Rove’s indictment and the crumbling of the Bush presidency. The investigation was just another example of the losers in American politics hoping the legal process could achieve what they couldn’t at the ballot box. Yet despite the discomfort that Libby’s conviction will cause, it hardly threatens to bring down the President.

To be sure, Scooter Libby shouldn’t have lied to either the grand jury or to the FBI. But empathy demands that we understand the position of a political figure like Libby. He knew that whatever he said (under oath) would come back to bite him and his boss. Presumably, that’s why he lied about events, even though he had committed no crime.

We shall soon find out if President George W. Bush is the man he prides himself on being. Bush makes much of the premium he places on loyalty. He claims to do the right thing regardless of whether it is popular or not. If that’s really the case, Scooter Libby should sleep easy and expect a presidential pardon before he spends a single night in the cells. This whole investigation and trial has been a political affair from the start. So it is only appropriate that it should end with a political decision, not a legal one.