Scooter Libby, the Vice President's former Chief of Staff, has been found guilty on 4 of the 5 counts against him: two counts of perjury, one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice.
Not surprisingly, FoxNews is declaring the verdicts to be largely meaningless. The very same people that once declared the very same charges to be impeachable "high crimes and misdemeanors" are now saying such crimes don't matter.
Fred Barnes' take is particularly laughable:
I would stop short of calling it politically devastating, however, because no one was charged with an underlying crime here of actually having illegally leaked the name of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press. We know who the original leaker was - Richard Armitage at the State Department - but he wasn't charged, nor was anyone else. So this is not quite as devastating as it could be if there was some underlying crime.
Remind me again what Clinton's "underlying crimes" were? Oh, that's right... There weren't any. Oral sex wasn't illegal in Washington, DC when Clinton was impeached. Meanwhile, Libby lies about a matter directly involving national security, and, because of those lies, it became impossible to prosecute him for any underlying crimes. Remember Fitzgerald's "sand in the eyes of the umpire" analogy? That's what that was about. But no matter.... if a Republican is involved, the standards change. Or something.
In the end what FoxNews and Fred Barnes say is irrelevant. The former Chief of Staff for the Vice President of the United States was just convicted of 4 very serious offenses in a court of law. That's a very, very big deal.
UPDATE: ThinkProgress has video of Fitzgerald's statement.
UPDATE II: Harry Reid out in front calling on the President to pledge not to pardon Libby. Smart preemptive move that Bush will no doubt ignore. Reid:
“I welcome the jury’s verdict. It’s about time someone in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics. Lewis Libby has been convicted of perjury, but his trial revealed deeper truths about Vice President Cheney’s role in this sordid affair. Now President Bush must pledge not to pardon Libby for his criminal conduct.”
And the White House response? They can't comment on an ongoing investigation.
My question: How long will it take before they dig up the video of Bush promising to fire anyone involved should a guilty verdict come down? If I remember correctly, there weren't any caveats for the appeals process. What are we supposed to believe, that he was going to fire them without issuing a comment? Riiiiight.....
UPDATE III: Today's verdict is bound to drown out the rest of the day's news, including the very important Senate hearings investigating the political machinations behind the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. If you haven't been following this one closely, it looks like the political futures of Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) may both be on the line. ThinkProgress has some video, but TPM and TPMMuckraker are providing full coverage and analysis.
Then again, maybe these two stories fit together nicely. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has now described one aspect of the story as "possible obstruction of justice."
UPDATE IV:
Nobody else lied to the FBI and the grand jury. Only Libby. And that makes it pretty obvious that he was trying to hide the one thing he knew that no one else did: the fact that he learned Valerie Plame Wilson's identity from Dick Cheney.For some reason, in May 2003 Cheney went ballistic over a couple of anonymous statements Joe Wilson made to Nick Kristof and Walter Pincus, statements that weren't especially damaging to Cheney and could have been challenged pretty easily. It's hard to say why (my longtime guess is here), but the end result was that Cheney ferreted out Plame's identity, passed it along to Libby, and told him to put a full-court press on Wilson. Libby thought it was worth lying about this because it threatened to provide a clue to just how involved Cheney had been in spinning the prewar intelligence on Iraqi nukes. That was the one thing serious enough to make them wildly overreact to a couple of otherwise toothless allegations.
Insomuch as Libby mission was to inoculate his boss, he can most definitely assume it has been accomplished. Unless, of course, he decides to make a deal.
UPDATE V: A few weeks back, David "Vital Center" Broder predicted Bush would soon see a fairly substantial bounce in the polls. Presidents always rebound, he proclaimed; thevital center always holds. I wonder what he has to say now.
Carpetbagger takes us through the last 24 hours:
Scooter Libby, the first high-ranking White House official to face criminal charges in over a century, has been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, stemming from a smear campaign he and the Vice President worked on together.Nine Americans were killed in Iraq yesterday, and suicide bombers killed 93 people in a crowd of Shiite pilgrims this morning in coordinated attacks.
The Walter Reed scandal dealing with mistreatment of wounded veterans has become a massive embarrassment for the Bush gang, and the White House is struggling to avoid responsibility.
And the prosecutor purge scandal is hitting its stride today, as Senate hearings expose a massive and systemic fiasco in which the Justice Department and the White House fired U.S. Attorneys, without cause, for political purposes and then lied about it.
That's one hell of a hellish 24 hours.
Karma's a bitch, innit?
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