Razzle Dazzle: Above Law, Scooter Skates

Razzle Dazzle
Above Law, Scooter Skates


When Vice President Dick Cheney directed then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to give the United Nations false evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, he reportedly stated, "Your poll numbers are in the 70s. You can afford to lose a few points."

One can imagine the Vice President making the case for commuting Scooter Libby's sentence by telling President Bush, "Your poll numbers are in the 20s. You can't possibly go any lower."

If he said such a thing, it would be one of the rare times when Mr. Cheney was both honest and accurate. At this point, only True Believers still approve of the job Mr. Bush is doing, and most of them not only agree with the President's statement that the 2-1/2-year prison sentence given to Mr. Cheney's former Chief of Staff for obstruction of justice and perjury was "excessive," they don't believe he should have faced criminal charges.

Another Round in Iraq War

For them and for Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby's lying to investigators from the staff of Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald - who, it should be emphasized, is a Republican selected for the job by Mr. Bush - about his role in leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame was no crime. Rather, it was a counteroffensive against those seeking to discredit the case for invading Iraq, as Ms. Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, had in a New York Times op-ed article four years ago debunking claims that Saddam Hussein had sought yellowcake for the manufacture of nuclear weapons from Niger. Mr. Wilson had traveled to Niger more than a year prior to the launching of the war on behalf of the CIA to investigate reports about such an attempt and discovered them to be unfounded.

White House Photo by David Bohrer IMMORAL AUTHORITY: The commutation of the 30-month prison sentence for Scooter Libby (left) before he served a day behind bars was yet another example of the above-the-law ethos of Vice President Dick Cheney as the deeply flawed grandmaster of the Bush Administration. Mr. Libby, sometimes known as "Cheney's Cheney," was the Vice President's point man for making the case for the Iraq invasion. It is more than likely that he was acting on his instructions in seeking to discredit Mr. Wilson, and in the process revealing his wife's identity and rendering her useless as a covert agent.

At that point in July 2003, nearly four months after the war began, no evidence had been found of the weapons of mass destruction that Mr. Powell had warned of during his UN speech. Just as importantly from a political standpoint, it had become clear that Mr. Bush's celebratory "Mission Accomplished" photo opportunity in May had been premature, and that contrary to Mr. Cheney's assertion that U.S. troops would be "greeted as liberators," there was considerable and deadly resistance to their presence - resulting in carnage that continues to this day.

Mr. Wilson's op-ed article meant the Bush Administration would have some explaining to do about this war that already had emerged as something other than a cakewalk, at a time when it figured to be a prime issue in the 2004 election. Perhaps just as disturbing to Mr. Cheney, it amounted to a challenge to his authority and credibility.

As has become increasingly obvious, the Vice President regards Mr. Bush and himself (especially) as beyond reproach by the likes of Congress and the media. Once viewed as the sober, experienced insider who would guide a callow, incurious President with little prior knowledge of foreign policy, Mr. Cheney's image has actually taken a bigger hit than Mr. Bush's during their 6-1/2 years in office. He has become a kind of caricature, viewed in the media as either Darth Vader or Daffy Dick.

A Kinship With Junior Soprano

That image was satirized to devastating effect in one of the final-season episodes of "The Sopranos," when Uncle Junior, confined to a psychiatric facility for shooting Tony, wrote Mr. Cheney a letter asking him to, in effect, commute his sentence.

It began, "As a powerful man all too familiar with accidental gunplay, I am writing in the hope that you will intervene in my case." After Junior got a form letter in reply, he told one confidant that a fellow patient had informed him "we'll have a better chance if we write him at his outfit - Halliburton."

More often, Mr. Cheney has brought to mind the bandit leader in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" who claimed to be a Federal policeman. When Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs asked to see his badge, the bandit replied, "I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges."

Mr. Cheney has taken that posture from the time that he refused to disclose the identities of the members of his energy task force in 2001. It reached the point of logical absurdity last month when it was revealed that he had refused to abide by an executive order regarding the disclosure of national security information by

arguing that it did not cover him because the vice presidency was not part of the executive branch.

It turned out that Mr. Cheney, after turning over data on what materials he had classified or declassified as top secret for national security reasons in 2001 and 2002, refused to give such material to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives beginning in 2003 - the year we began the adventure in Iraq that he engineered. When the oversight office pressed him for those documents, he responded by trying to have it abolished.

Singular Exemption

After the dispute became public, one of Mr. Bush's spokeswomen, Dana Perino, told one reporter who asked whether the Vice President believed himself above the law, "He's not exempt from following the laws of the United States. He's just exempt from this reporting requirement in this particular executive order."

This made for rich satire by Jon Stewart and a host of political cartoonists imagining Mr. Cheney as a separate branch of government, but biting ridicule was hardly a new experience for the Vice President. It was not until U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel threatened to take seriously the claim of his advisers - led by his replacement for Mr. Libby, David S. Addington - that he was not part of the executive branch by cutting off the $4.8 million in executive branch funds that Congress allocated for the Office of the Vice President that Mr. Cheney relented.

Nixon With Less Smarts

He has made clear that he believes that the power of the executive branch was improperly diluted in an overreaction to the Watergate scandal that cut short the presidency of his former boss, Richard Nixon. One of Mr. Cheney's biggest problems is that while he shares some of Mr. Nixon's weaknesses - notably his paranoia and lack of ethics when a political objective is at stake - he lacks his primary strengths, among them a gift for foreign policy and how to deal with other governments. Mr. Cheney and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - the other prime architect of the Iraq war - were two of the most-vociferous in-house critics of Ronald Reagan's detente policies with the Soviet Union; unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Reagan had the good judgment to tune them out.

Mr. Cheney's overload of testosterone - a consequence of hoarding it in his youth while obtaining five deferments from military service during the Vietnam era because, he explained later, "I had other priorities" - has influenced not only the Iraq invasion but the interrogation tactics used against prisoners that have brought charges of torture and eroded our image in other countries.

It's also consistent with a 2004 incident involving the Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program that sounds like a scene from "The Godfather."

Strong-Arming 'Justice'

In May, former U.S. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey told Congress of a situation 40 months ago when he was running the Justice Department because Attorney General John Ashcroft was hospitalized after emergency gall bladder surgery. Acting on the advice of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Comey had refused to sign a presidential order to reauthorize the monitoring of international phone calls and e-mails of people inside the U.S. who were suspected of having terrorist ties.

He testified that he learned that Mr. Bush's then-Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card were on their way to George Washington University Hospital to persuade a disoriented Mr. Ashcroft to sign the order. Mr. Comey contacted FBI Director Robert Mueller to meet him at the hospital and make sure that FBI agents did not try to bar him from stopping Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card. Even in his groggy state, Mr. Ashcroft refused to sign the reauthorization, Mr. Comey told Congress.

Bush Relented

Both Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card reported directly to Mr. Bush, but the strong-arm tactic sounded very much like something Mr. Cheney, who wanted the domestic wiretapping continued, would have favored. It wasn't until Mr. Comey told President Bush that he, Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller were all prepared to resign rather than reauthorize a program that they believed was illegal that the President agreed to allow changes to be made in how the monitoring was conducted.

The willingness to do whatever was necessary to continue a program top Justice Department officials believed violated the law was consistent with the outing of Ms. Plame, the commuting of Mr. Libby's sentence, and the event that led to both those actions: the false case for invading Iraq. Just as the administration, with Mr. Cheney repeating the information long after it was discredited, made a public-relations pitch for the invasion by suggesting that Iraq had links to both 9/11 and Al Qaeda, Mr. Bush justified Mr. Libby's get-out-of-jail card with arguments that wouldn't hold up under close scrutiny.

The Commuter's Logic

"I respect the jury's verdict," the President said in a statement. "But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive."

Actually, according to the Los Angeles Times, three-quarters of the 198 defendants sentenced in Federal court last year on an obstruction of justice conviction - just one of the four crimes of which a Federal jury found Mr. Libby guilty - drew prison time, and their average sentence was more than twice what he had received. One case seemed particularly glaring in contrast: it involved a veteran of Vietnam and the first Gulf War who, like Mr. Libby, had no prior criminal record, but whose 33-month sentence Justice Department lawyers argued was appropriate because it conformed to Federal sentencing guidelines for the offense.

Presidents' use of their commutation power has almost always occurred after a convicted criminal began serving his sentence; in this case Mr. Bush invoked it immediately after the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington denied Mr. Libby's request for a stay of sentence pending his appeal of the jury's verdict.

Fine Won't Set Him Back

Mr. Bush contended that Mr. Libby was suffering enough from the other penalties which he let stand, including two years of probation and a $250,000 fine, noting that the convictions had also "forever damaged" his reputation and that he would be unable to practice law if the convictions were not overturned.

But Mr. Libby has become such a martyr of the Republican right that he figures to make the amount of the fine many times over from speaking appearances, a book deal, and the high-level corporate job that figures to be his for the asking. In that world, rather than damaging his reputation, he has made himself an extremely valuable commodity by proving that he is willing to take a legal bullet for his boss without pointing a finger upward. If Mr. Libby really cared what the larger public thought of him, his conscience would have been pricked four years ago about looking to smear a former diplomat and "out" his wife as a covert agent. Instead, he served Mr. Cheney's interests and his own by attempting to nullify the effect of an article that raised troubling questions about the justifications given by the Bush Administration for going to war. And unlike most convicts whose sentences are cut short, he has neither expressed remorse for his offenses nor shown by his behavior a desire to change for the better.

There were some who speculated that President Bush commuted Mr. Libby's prison sentence out of fear that he might otherwise seek leniency by giving Mr. Fitzgerald information about misdeeds by others higher up in the administration.

Unlikely to Have Sung

That's possible, but not the most likely reason. Mr. Libby's sentence wasn't so long as to convince him that burning some very profitable future bridges was preferable to doing his time, particularly when the political calendar made it likely that Mr. Bush would have freed him on his way out of office, after serving barely half his sentence.

A far more plausible explanation is that, just as Mr. Cheney once persuaded Mr. Bush to push through a second round of tax cuts that primarily benefited the rich on the grounds that it was a just reward for winning the 2002 Congressional mid-term elections, he convinced him that they were entitled to indulge Mr. Libby for taking one for the team. Just as the tax cut played to the most important part of the President's voting base, the commutation convinced his entire base - however much it has shrunk - that he wasn't as lame a duck as the rest of the country believes.

High on Power

If moral certainty was an issue for this administration, we wouldn't have been diverted from battling Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to go to war with Iraq on trumped-up evidence, in the process dangerously weakening our struggle against the terrorists in numerous ways.

For Mr. Cheney in particular, absolute power was as harmful an intoxicant as greed was for the three scufflers in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," whose grand dreams literally turned to gold dust in the wind. The publicity poster for that 59-year-old movie could have been designed with Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby and the rest of the crew in mind: "The Nearer They Get to Their Treasure, the Farther They Get From the Law."