No Law and Order
I saw recently that Fred Thompson said in an interview with Chris Wallace that, if he were president, he would pardon Libby immediately. (No surprise there, I guess, given his involvement in the Libby Defense Trust). Here’s the relevant section of the interview:
WALLACE: And you helped raise millions of dollars for his extraordinary
legal expenses. Would President Thompson — you like the sound of that probably.
Would President Thompson pardon Libby now or would you wait until all of his
legal appeals are exhausted?
THOMPSON: I'd do it now.
WALLACE: Because?
THOMPSON: I'd do it now. This is a trial that never would have been brought
in any other part of the world. This is a miscarriage of justice.
One man and his wife and 14-year-old and 10-year-old children are bearing
the brunt of a political maelstrom here that produced something that never
should have come about.
These people knew in the very beginning — the Justice Department, this
Justice Department and the special counsel knew in the very beginning that the
thing that was creating the controversy, who leaked Valerie Plame's name, did
not constitute a violation of the law.
And then they knew that it — someone did leak the name. And it was Mr.
Armitage. It wasn't Scooter Libby.
But he evidently wasn't a designated bad guy, so they passed over that and
spent the next year drilling in a dry well and finally got some inconsistencies
or some failure to remember out of Mr. Libby and made a prosecution out of it
and went to trial on a he-said, she-said perjury case and faulty memory, when
practically every witness in the trial either had inconsistent statements, told
the FBI one thing, told the grand jury something else, inconsistent between the
witnesses that were presented at the case, and sometimes both.
And yet at the end of the day, the only person that the jury got an
opportunity to pass judgment on was Scooter Libby. It's not fair. And I would do
anything that I could to alleviate that.
But that made me wonder if Thompson felt the same way about things when the shoe was on the other foot, and it was Bill Clinton who had been caught in a lie when there was no underlying crime. And, surprise, surprise, Thompson supported impeachment and here's how his finished his speech on the floor of the Senate:
Rule of law, indeed. But apparently that sacred principle can be applied on a case by case basis. Ah, the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.At a time when all of our institutions are under assault, when the Presidency
has been diminished and the Congress is viewed with skepticism, our Judiciary
and our court system have remarkably maintained the public's confidence. Now the
President's actions are known to every school child in America. And in the midst
of these partisan battles, many people still think this matter is just `lying
about sex.'But little by little, there will be a growing appreciation that it
is about much more than that. And in years to come, in every court house in
every town in America, juries, judges, and litigants will have the President's
actions as a bench mark against which to measure any attempted subversion of the
judicial process. The notion that anyone, no matter how powerless, can get equal
justice will be seen by some as a farce.And our rule of law--the principle that many other countries still dream about--the principle that sets us apart, will have been severely damaged. If this does not constitute damage to our government and our society, I cannot imagine what does. And for that he should be convicted.
