The Case for Pardoning Libby

Why on earth did Scooter Libby tell lies to the FBI? Well, yes, to protect the Vice President and so forth and so on. But also, because he had good reason to fear that if he told the truth, he might go to prison. There is a law against "outing" a covert CIA agent. That law might or might not have applied in this case. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald ultimately decided he couldn't make the charge stick, but Libby didn't know that when the FBI came calling. He gambled that lying was safer, and he lost.

Libby is suffering well-deserved obloquy. The conservative voices calling for a Presidential pardon would be on firmer ground if they threw a stone or two themselves, or gave other evidence that they disapprove of government lying, even for a cause they believe in. But the baying of hounds among Democrats and liberals, and in the press, is astonishing. Yes, lying to the FBI is wrong wrong wrong. But was the behavior that put Libby in this situation — the situation where either lying or telling the truth could send him to prison — also wrong?

We now know that several people in the Administration told several journalists that Valerie Plame Wilson was CIA. We also know that most of these conversations were part of a concerted effort by the Vice President's office to spin the Iraq war. If not illegal, this certainly was not attractive. And, as everyone now recognizes, that concerted effort (and various lies related to it) were the real story. Newspaper readers were not offered that story, at first, because to tell the real story would have involved revealing a source. The real story only came out as a result of the legal process that forced several journalists to reveal their sources.

Yet none of this has caused much doubt among journalists about the importance of anonymous leaks and the need to protect sources. To protect the secrecy of her conversations with government officials, Judith Miller went to jail for three months and (at least for a while) was a heroine and martyr for it. Scooter Libby now faces years, not months, of jail because he participated in essentially identical conversations, then lied about them. But he also might have faced jail if he had told the truth. It's the conversations themselves that put him in this bind. And yet he's the goat.

Those conversations were either good things or bad things. If they were bad, why do journalists believe they deserve special protection from the law? If they were good, why is Scooter Libby being punished for his role in them?

Then, too, start piling up all the lies told by this Administration in advancing its war in Iraq. Rank them in importance. Where would you put Scooter Libby's unconvincing faulty memory about who told what to whom about Valerie Plame Wilson? Not very high, I think. If President Bush has a shred of humanity in him — if he has suffered even a tiny moment of doubt about this huge and tragic mess he has gotten our country into — how can he let the clock tick him out of office without pardoning a very small player in this tragedy, but the one who happened to get caught?

As for Democrats and liberals, I feel as vindictive as any other. But ask yourself: if, a couple of years from now, Dick Cheney is going around giving $75,000 speeches and George W. Bush is accepting honorary degrees and planning his presidential library, will you feel better or worse that some guy named Scooter Libby is languishing behind bars?