A Stephen Hayes article in the Weekly Standard that provides a glimpse into the character of Scooter Libby also contains this passage about his sentencing.
Two years later, after thousands of hours of sworn testimony to FBI agents and grand juries by dozens of journalists and Bush administration officials; after the jailing of a New York Times reporter for contempt and evidence that a number of media figures had hedged the truth or lied through their teeth when it came to their own reporting on Wilson and Plame, Fitzgerald charged no one with wrongdoing except Libby, who was convicted of perjury and impeding the investigation. Although Fitzgerald never charged Libby or anyone else with exposing the identity of a covert CIA operative, he urged the judge to punish Libby as if he had committed such a crime. And so the judge has done.
The judge completes the process of a surrogate trial described in this December 2006 post at Quasiblog:
Nevertheless, both Fitzgerald and Tatel -- and, it must be noted, a host of partisan observers -- have asserted that Libby's trial for perjury is, in reality, a substitute for prosecution of the more specific underlying crime. Here is Judge Tatel's strange logic on that score:
Insofar as false testimony may have impaired the special counsel’s identification of culprits, perjury in this context is itself a crime with national security implications. What’s more, because the charges contemplated here relate to false denials of responsibility for Plame’s exposure, prosecuting perjury or false statements would be tantamount to punishing the leak.
A perjury trial in these circumstances has one distinct advantage, however, accruing solely to the prosecution: Libby forfeits the right to confront his real accusers.
Indeed, in the larger arena, who are his accusers? Joe Wilson? David Corn? Valerie Plame, herself? The C.I.A.? Their referral simply asks the Justice Department to determine whether a violation has occurred, though they themselves originally confirmed Ms. Plame's employment -- to a reporter! Is there any available witness to an originating crime who is not compromised in some substantive way? Neither Libby, nor we, will be afforded the opportunity to find out, because, as Fitzgerald argues in resisting Libby's discovery motion, none of the above is relevant to the case at hand.
Libby has gotten his substitute sentence for his conviction on the substitute crime of leaking the identity of a CIA agent. There is a strange logic in the judge's refusal to allow Libby's defense to present evidence impeaching Tim Russert's credibility, even though the actual charges against Libby were based grand jury testimony that he first heard of Plame from Russert. Ordinarily you would think the question of credibility would be crucial in a case where it's one man's word against another's. Ah, but credibility was not germane to the unspoken charge of leaking. Inadmissible.
Posted by: Patrick | February 27, 2007 at 05:33 PM