give’m some well-deserved hell, e’wheel.

Depressing, eh? The Beltway elite and their elegant parties, and people like Broder eating quail with Karl–that’s where the real action is, that’s where all the big decisions get made. And by the way, did you catch Richard Cohen’s column? He must have picked up by mistake an OLD talking point fax from Karl. Cohen sez, re Scooter: â€But the underlying crime is absent, the sentence is excessive and the investigation should not have been conducted in the first place. This is a mess. Should Libby be pardoned? Maybe. Should his sentence be commuted? Definitely.

Oh, definitely. Yep. Meanwhile lets all get back to looking the other way while our daughters and sons are slaughtered and maimed for a war that was started and sustained by lies. Blood is on Cohen’s hands, and also on the hands of most of the Mainstream Media who went along with whatever Karl fed them.

Exchanged comments yesterday in thread at FDL with Christy about the weirdness of Ol’ 60 Grit O’Beirne’s performance on behalf of Comstock’s Crew on MTP this Sunday, one of the outside-the-cocktail-wienie-circuit efforts for the benefit of Team Libby. I’d asked her:

What I have been wondering is whether this is a sort of elaborate kabuki, wherein the OVP pays for widely disseminated calls for pardon, knowing full well that 1) it is absolutely NOT in his best interest for Libby to be pardoned, since a pardon not only requires an admission of guilt (thanks for the reminder, SP CPA) and waives Libby’s right to plead the Fifth Amendment, and 2) that the White House would also not want to pardon Libby for similar reasons and may already have agreed with OVP that this is not possible.

But in order to keep the neo-con and A*P*C members of the administration and base in line, they push this repeated yet mocking call for pardon, leading to a kind of cognitive dissonance from those of us watching from outside.

Does that make any sense?

SP CPA = Stephen Parrish, who pointed out that a Kentucky Supreme Court decision (p. 43) applied with clarification an earlier SCOTUS decision:

The United States Supreme Court first interpreted the pardoning power granted

by Article 11 in United States v. Wilson , 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 150, 8 L.Ed. 640 (1833). In that

opinion, Chief Justice Marshall established four principles with respect to the operation

and effect of a presidential pardon: (1) a pardon exempts the person upon whom it is

bestowed from punishment for the crime pardoned; (2) a pardon is of no effect unless

is accepted by the person pardoned and (3) brought to the attention of the court in

which it is sought to be enforced; and (4) a pardon is subject to judicial review and

interpretation.

A pardon is an act of grace, proceeding from the power intrusted

[sic] with the execution of the laws, which exempts the individual on whom

it is bestowed, from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has

committed; it is the private, though official act of the executive magistrate,

delivered to the individual for whose benefit it is intended, and not

communicated officially to the court.

It is a constituent part of the judicial system, that the judge sees

only with judicial eyes, and knows nothing respecting any particular case

of which he is not informed judicially; a private deed, not communicated to

him, whatever may be its character, whether a pardon or release, is totally

unknown, and cannot be acted upon. . . .

. . . A pardon is a deed to the validity of which delivery is essential,

and delivery is not complete without acceptance; it may then be rejected

by the person to whom it is tendered; and if it be rejected, we have

discovered no power in a court to force it to him.

It may be supposed, that no being condemned to death would

reject a pardon ; but the rule must be the same in capital case and in

misdemeanors. . . .

[The pardon] may be absolute or conditional ; it may be controverted

by the prosecutor, and must be expounded by the court. These

circumstances combine to show, that this, like any other deed, ought to be

brought judicially before the court, by plea, motion or otherwise.

SP CPA noted in particular the bit I’ve bolded. This is so not over, but it looks like an exercise in futility on the part of a group of people who are clearly not in touch with reality. In light of Rutenberg’s gossipy report, I suspect that someone in OVP and EO are making demurs and head nods, as if they are listening to the requests, but are clearly not going to do a damned thing for Libby. Would be lovely to see if there’s a correlation in the volume of donations to the Libby Defense fund and all the kosher cocktail weinies served, but of course we’ll likely never know. The piece de resistance in this kabuki would be for Libby to reject the pardon claiming that he wasn’t guilty and would not therefore accept it; we should take odds on that outcome.

Dickerson in Slate:

â€But those I’ve talked to who know the president well and have worked for him predict a pardon for two reasons.

First: Dick Cheney. The vice president may not be winning as many foreign-policy battles as he used to, but Libby’s fate is a highly personal matter for Cheney. He will ask Bush for a pardon, and he is unlikely to back down. If Bush resists, Cheney could argue that his close aide Libby should not go to jail while Karl Rove, another key figure in the scandal, has been protected by Bush and the administration.

The second reason Libby will walk is President Bush’s dismal approval rating. The number of people who would be angered by a pardon who haven’t already abandoned the president could fit in an airport shuttle bus. Given the conservative defections from Bush over his support of immigration reform, a pardon of Libby — which would be popular with conservatives — might actually improve his approval ratings. Libby’s conviction is seen as such an outrage among conservatives that one former Bush aide suggested ’the consequences of not pardoning, if Scooter is led away in shackles, will be uglier than pardoning.’â€

Is it just me or does #2 sound like a ridiculous non-starter? These arguments are typically tri-part. Dickerson couldn’t get past one.

Carolyn

Yes.

Several commenters over at First Draft mention that Bush has no power to commute a sentence–that the power to commute is exlusively the right of the judiciary branch (presumably the Supreme Court?). If this is correct, then it would seem that all these â€commute Libby’s sentence†op-eds are just so much PR, since Bush can’t do anything about commutation anyway.

Neil: I can see Timmy now…

â€Oh, you were talking about THOSE spreadsheets. No no no, those aren’t VOTER caging lists. They’re lists of… people who keep… er, chickens. In cages. Chicken farmers. And since farmers are traditionally republicans, we had data on people with cages, because they were likely to be Republicans, and we wanted to encourage them to vote.

It’s all perfectly innocent.â€

I love the Dickerson smackdown. That guy is A) mad he’s too dumb to have missed the Ari F. leak and B) mad nobody thinks he’s interesting enough to be considered a conflicted media figure like Judy Miller, Tim Russert, Bob Woodward, etc.. Did everyone see Dickerson’s piece on the Libby pardon – the one where he got the central animating fact of his dramatic closing paragraph exactly backwards?

From Slate.com:
â€In 1987, Reagan’s Labor Secretary Ray Donovan famously asked after his acquittal on larceny and fraud charges: â€Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?†He worried that the sensational coverage of his indictment* would always overpower the smaller news coverage of his exoneration. One way for Libby’s supporters running for president to restore his good name would be to send him a job application now.

Correction, June 18, 2007: The article originally and incorrectly said that Ray Donovan was convicted on larceny and fraud charges. He was only indicted.â€

Nice asterisk asshat. Libby doesn’t need his reputation restored because HE WAS CONVICTED. It wasn’t the court that sullied his reputation – it was his own actions, actions which a jury of his peers found him guilty of beyond a reasonable doubt. If Libby is pardoned without an admission of guilt and Bush says the conviction was any kind of injustice it will be Fitzgerald and Walton that will be searching for an office to get their reputation back – their fine names having been smeared by a bunch of weenie eating freaks who didn’t hear the evidence of the case except over drinks at parties hosted by friends of the accused. That’s some racket.

It seems to me that the â€We can’t let Scooter go to prison!†club is a combination of the mendaciousness of the press in having been exposed as willing mouthpieces for the Administration, as well as what Digby has chronicled so well, the feeling that Scooter and the Gang of 500 are an aristocracy to whom the rules do not apply. I have noticed the same phenomenon in the Conrad Black trial, who has been accused of the same thefts of shareholder money that were the cause of very long prison sentences for the heads of Tyco and Worldcom, yet outside of the British press, has been the recipient of generally favourable newscoverage, and the inevitable â€Fitzgerald is a rogue prosecutor, he is criminalizing (insert â€politicsâ€, â€businessâ€, â€good reportingâ€, etc.) I can’t help but think that the combination of Fitzgerald as prosecutor, a good neocon like Conrad and the â€consulting fees†he has regularly made to â€journalists†like David Frum and George Will, as well as directors fees to Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger, have helped his coverage.

But in addition to press bribery, these guys think that they are really immune aristocrats. Conrad himself said it in an email defending his use of Hollinger funds to go to Bora Bora with his wife, Barbara Amiel:

â€â€¦We have to find a balance between an unfair taxation on the company and a reasonable treatment of the founder-builder-managers. We are proprietors, after all, beleaguered though we may be. I am not prepared to re-enact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of nobility.â€

Conrad Black – the worst (former) Canadian of all time!

Is there anybody left in the voter rights division at the DOJ who a law-abiding citizen would trust to investigate former USA Griffin’s involvment in Caging.xls and Caging-1.xls? Doesn’t the secretary of State in Florida have an obligation under the law to investiate?

Ishmael,

I would expect Cheney and Rumsfeld to spend their days close to each other and their houses (not official residence) are that way now. And in time Wolfowitz to move close by too, but he is still relatively young.

They are all very close.

Sort of a â€good ol’ boys club.â€

EW If Libby goes to jail what happens to allof that 5M $? I know the lawyers get some but does Libby get anything left over whaen he gets out?

I wonder if the conservative blue collar workers think they would get a pardon or such loyal support from OVP or any one for that matter if they lied to a GJ? Libby’s a crook pure and simple.

â€That Politico article appeared on the 35th anniversary of the Watergate break-in.â€

June 17 [Watergate Break-in Day] is my birthday. Until 1972 it was boring ole â€Battle of Bunker Hill†day. No more. I cherish it!!

FWIW, I have been told that the Libby appeal (a 122 page .pdf) has been filed. However, I can’t find it on PACER, and I was actually sly enough to check both the Criminal and Appellate levels. However, that exhausted my PACER skills.

â€EW If Libby goes to jail what happens to allof that 5M $? I know the lawyers get some but does Libby get anything left over whaen he gets out?â€

Maybe Libby could use some of that money while he is in the slam, you know, so he can buy his own cigarettes rather than trading favors! If I had more money I would buy Scooter six packs a day, if he would promise to smoke them!

BREAKING — but expected. . .

THIS JUST IN!
well — scooter’s ace appellate
team just filed their notice of
appeal — we learn only a few things
from it — and i’ve enumerated them,
along with an image of the full-one
page-notice-filing. . .

take a look. . .

no pardon — no winers. never.

The arguments in that brief look awfully thin to me….

The memory expert claim is particularly galling. After 3 months of watching this administration’s top managers lie to Congress about how they can’t remember anything, with varying degrees of lying convincingly, it is ludicrous to think that Scooter should be able to claim on paper that his memory is faulty (backed by expert testimony), but not have his claim put to the test by the jury.

Unless the Appeals Court stays the sentence, (NPR is saying several judges have to recuse themselves from service on this panel because of past associations with Liddy) I think in a few weeks Liddy will hear the gates clang behind him. Why???

Bush, if anything, doesn’t change his mind or mantra, and all along he has said two things — anyone who leaked will be held responsible, and he or his spokesperson has said the process has to run. The man is not famous for re-evaluating his basic assumptions or even thinking his assumptions through to an end point.

Now — I suspect what we are looking at here is some very polite bullying on the part of insiders who know a thing or two, and implied in what they are saying in public is the threat to reveal things Bush does not want made public. I see much of this polite pressure as the veiled fist of those who are quite capable of Mafia style reprisals, and at this juncture the only protection Bush has is a posture of being devoted to the consistency of his past statements. He can continue to try to govern on the basis of Faith — which does not look kindly on a change of mind — or he can kiss the rings of the Godfathers, and take ownership of Libby’s acts, committed in loyality to the power center Bush once represented, but no longer does.

If he Pardons — well Waxman already is well underway with investigations of matters related to the Plame outing, and Waxman would not hesitate to call a pardoned Libby for a full review under oath and with no 5th amendment protections should he accept a pardon, an admission of a need for a pardon, or guilt. And it remains possible the Wilson’s civil suit will live and eventually subject many more in the WH to depositions, civil trial, and financial penalities. In other words, for Bush, a Pardon concludes very little. Letting Libby go to the Hosscow, potentially lets things die down till Jan, 2009 when he could safely compassionately pardon, and give Libby back 12 months of life on the outside. Money can be raised to give Libby a seat in a Think Tank on his return from Prison, it can be held in trust under some cover or other, and be sufficient to keep him quiet given that he has few other options. But as John Dean frequently tells us, the worst of all possible worlds would be if Bush actually talked to someone about the deal.

So — if Libby goes to the slammer, the little wennie boys and girls could turn on Bush. They could start talking out of school. We could see more leaks, but these about Bush’s incompetence or worse. But could Bush survive such a storm if he predicates it all on Faith and Process? I think he could fake it and survive to January 2009. At this juncture, I suspect that is his goal. Neo-con’s and Corpartists are not a big voting block — but the Faith folk can sustain him for at least a year and months.

And why did Rod Portman resign today? Says it is about more time with family — they need a new excuse, something about wanting to tour all the roller coasters in the country or such like.