On Those Letters
My mother is in town, so I’ll be visiting rather than writing. I’ll start catching up to my blogging on Saturday. But I did want to make an initial comment on the letters written in favor of leniency for Scooter. Sidney Blumenthal has a superb column at Salon on the letters in general:
One after another, the letter writers declare that Libby’s "character"is "inconsistent" with the jury’s verdict. These same words –"character" and "inconsistent" — appear dozens of times.
[snip]
The act of procuring these letters is further evidence of Libby’sstove-piping of disinformation. Libby could not reasonably haveexpected to sway the judge, but there is a higher authority to which heis appealing. These letters constitute the beginnings of the LibbyLobby’s pardon campaign.
Blumenthal is right. The letters weren’t going to win Libby the Probation that his supporters were seeking. And judging from the look on Judge Walton’s face as Ted Wells read the Wolfowitz letter (which, incidentally, was submitted after it became clear that these letters would be released publicly), the letters were too saccharine to do the job.
But I’d like to poach from my Guardian column of today, addressing much of the same ground Blumenthal did, to point out the glaring conflicts some of these letter-writers had.
June 9, 2003: The President Gets Involved
On June 8, 2003, George Stephanopolous and Condi Rice had the following exchange:
S: But let me stop you right there, because many in the United States goverment knew before then that this…
R: George, somebody, somebody down may have known. But I will tell you that when this issue was raised with the intelligence community–because we actually do go through the process of asking the intelligence community, Can you say this? Can you say that? Can you say this? — the intelligence community did not know at that time, or at levels that got to us, that this…
S: But let me show you something here, this is…
R: …serious questions about this report.
S: [Reads from Kristof’s article] That’s hardly low level, the vice president’s office.
R: Well, the vice president’s office may have asked for that report. [snip] … this particular report, it was not known to us that it was a forgery.
The next day, the very first thing Scooter Libby recorded in his notes was that the President was interested in the Kristof report about the SOTU.
In his grand jury testimony, Libby couldn’t provide any details regarding the circumstances of the note, beyond suggesting that he told the Vice President of the President’s interest in the issue.