Reap What You Sow
“Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.” Job 4:8
Public outcry about the recent Libby commutation has created a really interesting backlash of conservative revisionist history and schoolyard ethics.
Here is a sample of the conservative arguments that are being aped by letter to the editor writers and right-wing columnists like Jack Kelly.
- Clinton pardoned crooks so why can’t Bush do the same?
- Clinton didn’t serve any time for lying to a grand jury so why should Libby?
- Clinton’s Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, received no jail time and a $50,000 fine for taking documents from the National Archive, why shouldn’t Libby have received a similar sentence?
- No real crime was committed. Libby was just the victim of an overzealous prosecutor.
- No Democrat would have received a sentence like this because the judiciary is out to get Republicans.
Let’s go through these one by one just to see how shallow they are.
The first is an easy one. Politically motivated presidential pardons are almost always wrong no matter who granted them. The only exception I can recall was Ford pardoning Nixon. It was time for the country to move on and there was nothing to be gained by putting Nixon in jail (though I felt pretty bad about it at the time). Clinton was wrong to pardon Marc Rich. Bush was wrong to commute (and eventually pardon) Libby. The founding fathers intended this presidential constitutional power to be a check on the judiciary. It has instead become a irresistible source of political favors.
The second one is easy too. Clinton was indicted but never convicted of a crime. Libby was.
A sitting President can’t be put in jail. The founding fathers figured this one out. They knew that this shield would allow presidents to focus on their jobs rather than defending themselves in court. The balance to this special status is that Congress acts as the president’s prosecutor, judge, and jury. That’s why the House had to indict Clinton of lying to a Grand Jury and not a state or federal prosecutor. In the next step, the Senate had to decide whether or not to convict him of this crime and remove him from office. The Senate found him innocent. The justice department did have the option to pursue Clinton after he left office, but chose not to. Libby on the other hand, didn’t have this protection, was indicted, tried, found guilty, and received a jail sentence. He is currently appealing his conviction.
Sandy Berger is another case of spin and revisionist history. Sandy Berger was convicted of a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material from the National Archives. He only took copies. Contrary to many conservative claims, there is no proof that he destroyed any original documents. He claimed that he was just trying to refresh his memory in preparation for upcoming testimony. What is particularly ironic about this claim is that Vice President Cheney has refused to allow the National Archives access to his documents for the past four years claiming that his office is exempt from the President Order mandating compliance. The purpose of this mandate is to insure that all documents are preserved since they are public property. The Vice President’s office complied with this order during the first two years of the Bush administration. They first refused to provide access to the National Archives during the time Valerie Plame’s identity was leaked. You can draw your own conclusions.
The “no crime” claim is the most delusional and self serving. A jury of his peers after hearing all of the testimony convicted Libby of lying to a grand jury. That’s a crime. Whether or not he was guilty of a crime regarding the outing of Valerie Plame is unclear and if the documents have been destroyed, we may never know. But it doesn’t matter because that wasn’t the crime he was convicted of. He was convicted because he was unable to provide a jury a credible defense explaining why he told a grand jury two different stories about where the information about Valerie Plame originally came from. The jury rejected his claim that a faulty memory was the cause of his inconsistency. You have to remember that Libby is a very bright ivy-league lawyer. He is a legal expert. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing when he lied to the grand jury and EXACTLY what he was doing when he presented a weak defense of those lies in his perjury trial.
The “overzealous prosecutor” claim is just funny when you think about the $70M dollars that a Republican Congress paid to Kenneth Starr for the five years of wide ranging Whitewater investigations that ended up with no convictions and charges against Starr’s office of illegally leaking Grand Jury testimony. Patrick Fitzgerald (also appointed by Republicans) took two years, spent $1M, no scandals, and got a conviction.
Finally the Republican bias in the courts is just silly. The sentence that Libby received was the result of sentencing guidelines which the Republicans put in place. As part of their campaign against “liberal judges” they have effectively removed much of the flexibility that judges had in the past. What is particularly ironic is that a very similar case was just decided in the Supreme Court (US v. Rita). In that case the convicted perjurer claimed that his 33 month sentence was too harsh because he also was a first time offender, elderly, sick, served 24 years as a Marine including tours of duty in Vietnam and Iraq, and would be vulnerable in prison because of his work in criminal justice. The Bush administration opposed Rita’s appeal claiming that the sentence was appropriate given the Federal guidelines.
I guess at the end of the day, it shouldn’t seem all that surprising. As a country, we continue the self-indulgent pastime of trying to figure out who is right rather than what is right. This gives us unethical leaders who depend on spin and misinformation to create distrust and division among the voting public. The truth, though, is always more powerful than a lie no matter how effectively the lie is told. Fortunately, it appears that it will soon be harvest time.