By: Jane Hamsher
In a rather shocking move, Barak Obama’s General Counsel
Robert F. Bauer adds his voice to the chorus calling for Scooter Libby to be pardoned, but he believes he is coming at it from a different angle than the Libby apologists:
To Bush’s antagonists on left, a pardon would be only another act in the conspiracy — a further cover-up, a way of getting away with it. But this is the entirely wrong way of seeing things. A pardon is just what Bush’s opponents should want.
A pardon brings the president into the heart of the case. It compels him to do what he has so far managed to avoid: accept in some way responsibility for the conduct of his Administration in communicating with the public about national security and in its treatment of dissent. If the pardon would be politically explosive, then this is what the administration’s critics, hungering for accountability, have been waiting for. The case against this government on the larger charge of abuse of power is diminished, made even laughable, by resolving into a 30-month sentence for an obscure figure named Libby.
This may be well and fine for a Presidential candidate trying to massage a potential pardon into position as a campaign issue, but it’s an extremely cynical argument, and I really can’t imagine what the Obama campaign was thinking . This is about the rule of law, not political posturing. And as much as all the “liberal progressives” he is preaching to at arms’ length would like to see Bush publicly tied to the scandal, at this point in time we’d rather see some respect for the judicial process.
moreI hope Obama doesn't buy into this.
More from
Bauer:
A presidential pardon is finally an intervention by the President, his emergence from behind the thick curtain he has dropped between him and these momentous events involving his government, his policy, his Vice President. By pardoning Libby, he acknowledges that Libby is not really the one to confront the administration's accusers. Now the president, the true party in interest, would confront them, which is what his opponents have demanded all along.
Nothing in the nature of the pardon renders it inappropriate to these purposes. The issuance of a presidential pardon, not reserved for miscarriages of justice, has historically also served political functions -- to redirect policy, to send a message, to associate the president with a cause or position. Gerald Ford radically altered the nation's politics with the pardon of Richard Nixon. Credited with an act of national healing, he also spared the man who had selected him for the vice presidency and whose prosecution might have haunted his party even more than the act of pardoning him. He reshaped with a stroke of the pen the national agenda: this pardon, he told Congress, was meant to "change our national focus." George W. Bush's father expressed his contempt for the opposition's "criminalization" of policy differences, with a batch of pardons for high Republican officials convicted in the Iran-Contra scandals .
In each of these cases, the president who issued the pardons was, by determining the course of a criminal matter, redefining its political significance and acquiring in it a personal and lasting place. By pardoning Libby, Bush will have done the same. Presidential fingerprints, so far nowhere to be found in this case, will surface at last, indelibly, on the pardon.
Libby is said to be unpardonable because the act of lying, a subversion of the legal process, cannot go unpunished. Yet this is mere glibness. President Clinton's pardons included one granted to a farmer convicted of perjury in a bankruptcy proceeding. The lie was not in doubt but other circumstances carried the case for absolution. Is the difference one of station in life, the difference between the Chief of Staff to the Vice President and a hog farmer? Progressives can't mean this, having rightly refused to accept that President Clinton's own misleading testimony in legal proceedings outweighed other considerations favoring the preservation of his presidency.
Has he ever heard of Marc Rich?
The Problem With Pardoning Libby
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