Bush Spares Libby Prison

[dansdarkside]

By THERESA COOK and JASON RYAN
July 2, 2007
Hours after an appeals court shot down a final appeal to keep I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby out of prison pending the appeal of his conviction, President Bush commuted his sentence.
"I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive," Bush's statement read. "Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend 30 months in prison."

All I can say is, Wow Bush, just when I thought you could not **** up anymore.


More: ABC News: Bush Commutes Sentence: No Hard Time for 'Scooter'

[RickTheRipper]

Anyone mind telling me what Libby did? I saw articles on the internet, but I never read them.





Ok, I went and asked someone, and they said he ratted out a CIA agent, and now Bush pardoned him from jail.

If this is what went down, that's just downright stupid. I thought being a traitor of that degree earned you the firing squad, or at least a deportation.

Shame on you Bush, shame on you.

[dansdarkside]

Involvement in the Plame affair

Further information: CIA leak grand jury investigation, Plame affair, and Plame scandal timeline
Libby and Judith Miller

See main article: Plame affair#Judith Miller
Between 2003 and 2005, intense speculation centered on the possibility that Libby may have been the administration official who had "leaked" classified employment information about Valerie Plame, the wife of Iraq warJoseph Wilson and a covert CIA agent, and later tried to hide his having done so.[47] In August 2005, as revealed in grand jury testimony audiotapes played during the trial and reported in many news accounts, Libby testified that he met with Judith Miller, a reporter with the New York Times, on July 8, 2003, and discussed Plame with her.[48] critic
After refusing to testify to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury about this July 2003 meeting with Libby, Miller was jailed on July 7, 2005 for contempt of court. Although Libby signed a general waiver allowing journalists to discuss their conversations with him, Miller maintained that such a waiver did not serve to allow her to reveal her source; moreover, Miller argued that Libby's general waiver pertaining to all journalists could have been coerced and that she would only testify if given an individual waiver.[49] Months later, her new attorney, Robert Bennett, found out she'd had a written, voluntary waiver from Libby all along.[50]
After Miller had served most of her sentence, Libby reiterated that he had indeed given her a "waiver" both "voluntarily and personally". He attached the following letter, which, when released publicly, became the subject of further speculation about Libby's possible motives in sending it:

As noted above, my lawyer confirmed my waiver to other reporters in just the way he did with your lawyer. Why? Because as I am sure will not be news to you, the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me, or knew about her before our call.
. . . .
You went to jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover – Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats, bird flu and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work — and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers.
With admiration, Scooter Libby.[51][52][49]

After agreeing to testify, Miller was released on September 29, 2005, appearing before the grand jury the next day, but the charge against her was rescinded only after she testified again on October 12, 2005.[53] For her second grand jury appearance, Miller produced a notebook from a previously-undisclosed meeting with Libby on June 23, 2003, two weeks before Wilson's New York Times op-ed was published.[53] In her account published in the Times on October 16, 2005, based on her notes, Miller reports:

... in an interview with me on June 23 [2003], Vice President **** Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, discussed Mr. Wilson's activities and placed blame for intelligence failures on the C.I.A. In later conversations with me, on July 8 and July 12 [2003], Mr. Libby, ... [at the time] Mr. Cheney's top aide, played down the importance of Mr. Wilson's mission and questioned his performance. ... My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A. ... My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name [i.e., Valerie Plame]. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative" ....[53]

Her notes on her July 8, 2003 meeting with Libby does contain the name "Valerie Flame [sic]," which she added retrospectively. While Miller reveals publicly that she herself had misidentified the last name of Wilson's wife (aka Valerie Plame) in her own marginal notes on their interview as "Flame" instead of "Plame," in her grand jury (and later trial testimony), she remained uncertain when, how, and why she arrived at that name and did not attribute it to Libby:

I was not permitted to take notes of what I told the grand jury, and my interview notes on Mr. Libby are sketchy in places. It is also difficult, more than two years later, to parse the meaning and context of phrases, of underlining and of parentheses. On one page of my interview notes, for example, I wrote the name "Valerie Flame." Yet, as I told Mr. Fitzgerald, I simply could not recall where that came from, when I wrote it or why the name was misspelled. ... I testified that I did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby, in part because the notation does not appear in the same part of my notebook as the interview notes from him.[53]

A year and a half later, Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice in part for misleading the grand jury about when and how he learned that Plame was a CIA agent.[49][9][54]

Richard Armitage

See main article: Plame affair#Novak's "primary source": Richard Armitage
On August 30, 2006, the New York Times reported that Deputy Secretary of State Department Richard Armitage was the "initial and primary source" for columnist Robert Novak's article of July 14, 2003, which named Valerie Plame as a CIA operative.[55] CNN reported also that Armitage had been confirmed "by sources" as disclosing Plame's CIA role in a "casual conversation" with Novak.[56][57]

In short, he snitched on a Convert CIA agent and lied about it in front of the grand jury, and got a reporter thrown in jail for 2 years I think, and called her a liar. And his jail sentence was only going to be for 30 months. But according to bush that is "too harsh".

I still can't belive it, what sad times we live in. Thank god his time is almost done.

[RickTheRipper]

That guy's a douchebag, plain and simple.