Can President George W. Bush recover from the latest thunderbolt hurled down from the political heavens (or, as some partisans would say, hurled up from a more fiery place) in the form of the indictment of Vice-Presidential aide “Scooter” Libby in the Plamegate case?
Clearly, a lot is going to depend on what more comes out, whether Bush’s right hand man (and some say “brain”) Karl Rove is truly under the microscope and in danger of facing future legal problems and whether the GOP and White House’s ongoing response acknowledges the Plamegate problem or makes things worse by trying to say a teeny-weeny thing like perjury doesn’t matter (even though it mattered more than a teeny-weeny bit to talk show hosts such as Sean Hannity and GOP members of Congress when Bill Clinton was accused of perjury in a case involving a stained dress).
A Republican has already used this values-relative argument on Hardball (see VIDEO HERE) — and, if that’s what’s in the offing, look for this administration to be left with a thimble-full of support from independent voters who are notably unimpressed with partisan values-adjustments.
The Washington Post puts this in a larger context, tying it into the seemingly-inexorable curse that afflicts most Presidents — The Second Term Curse:
Along with ineffectiveness, overreaching, intraparty rebellion, plunging public confidence and just plain bad luck, scandal has now touched the highest levels of the White House staff.
Not surprisingly, Democrats were quick to condemn the president and his administration over the perjury and obstruction indictments of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. But even some Republicans suggested that the president and his team will have taken away the wrong lesson if they conclude that, other than the personal tragedy of Libby’s indictment, the long investigation changes nothing of significance.
House Government Reform Committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) was stinging, saying he was “very disappointed in Libby, and the White House, and the vice president and the president.”
“They should have taken care of this a long time ago,” Davis said in an interview. “They should have done their own investigation. They’re going to get very little sympathy on Capitol Hill, at least from me. . . . They brought this on themselves.”
This again underlines a split within the GOP between those who’ll support Bush and his administration at all costs, quickly adjusting their previously stated values and principles, and those who have more inflexible principles wedded to more traditional Republicanism a la Barry Goldwater — the law ‘n order Republicans.
On the other hand, Friday’s Indictment Day wasn’t as bad as what some expected. Even though Rove remains under the Special Prosecutor’s microscope, he wasn’t actually indicted. And, despite some predictions, Vice President Dick Cheney wasn’t named or indicted, even though analyst Dick Morris suggests he could remain in legal peril.
Another Washington Post piece notes that at the very LEAST the trial could be devastating to Cheney:
Lawyers involved in the case said Cheney himself and other top White House officials named in the indictment could be called as witnesses. A trial would examine in detail how the administration sold the nation on the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq and countered its critics.
“It’s a horrible situation for the vice president. Libby has been so close to Cheney,” said one of the lawyers involved in the case. “If there’s one thing that’s got to be open, it is a criminal trial and the vice president is a key witness.”
Another lawyer said it is clear from the indictment that any trial would have to delve into the private conversations between Cheney and Libby about Wilson and his wife.
The prosecutors will seek to prove that Libby’s statements are lies by going through a very detailed chronology of the events that occurred in the vice president’s office, including conversations with Cheney, one of the lawyers said.
“It has the potential to be politically damaging,” the lawyer said.
The lingering question is: will new details come out, actually implicating more officials? Rep.Henry Waxman is calling for a hearing in Congress, but it’ll be perceived as more of a partisan endeavor than anything Fitzgerald does. The Post‘s article adds this:
But the action of Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald nonetheless added to the sense that this is now an administration staggering to regain its equilibrium. The question now facing the embattled president is whether he will use this moment of vulnerability to reflect on what has gone wrong this year and why, and then look for ways to regain his effectiveness.
Citing both the indictment and the withdrawal of Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court on Thursday, former GOP congressman Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma said: “The president got a pretty good wake-up call. He needs to stop thinking about his grand legacy and being the all-time hero of the Republicans and concentrate on doing the job he was elected to do. He really has to get a grip on his administration.”
But that doesn’t seem possible if GWB adopts the stance taken by some of his supporters. For instance Wall Street Journal has an analysis that basically says if there was perjury it didn’t matter because the original crime being probed wasn’t committed. A small taste:
Mr. Fitzgerald has been dogged in pursuing his investigation, and he gave every appearance of being a reasonable and tough prosecutor in laying out the charges yesterday. But he has thrust himself into what was, at bottom, a policy dispute between an elected Administration and critics of the President’s approach to the war on terror, who included parts of the permanent bureaucracy of the State Department and CIA. Unless Mr. Fitzgerald can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Libby was lying, and doing so for some nefarious purpose, this indictment looks like a case of criminalizing politics.
If this is a conspiracy to silence Administration critics, it was more daft than deft. The indictment itself contains no evidence of a conspiracy, and Mr. Libby has not been accused of trying to cover up some high crime or misdemeanor by the Bush Administration. The indictment amounts to an allegation that one official lied about what he knew about an underlying “crime” that wasn’t committed. And we still don’t know who did tell Mr. Novak–presumably, it was the soon-to-be-infamous “Official A” from paragraph 21 of the indictment, although we don’t know whether Official A was Mr. Novak’s primary source or merely a corroborating one.
Would the same analysis be applied if this had been something involving Bill or Hillary Clinton (our memory is that the Journal had a bit to write about perjury allegations on that one), Harry Reid, John Kerry or any Democrat?
The Christian Science Monitor poses a key question: why was there all this time and effort put in to apparently thwart an investigation?
Now, with the prospect of a long-drawn-out and politically charged trial in Washington, a new question emerges: Why would I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, take the extraordinary risk of going to prison to thwart a special counsel’s investigation?
“There is an innocent explanation and a nefarious explanation,” says Paul Rothstein, a law professor at Georgetown University.
The nefarious explanation is that Mr. Libby and other White House insiders intentionally leaked the identity of a CIA agent to place her in danger to punish her husband for his public criticism of the administration’s Iraq policies, Professor Rothstein says. Under this theory, Libby’s alleged misstatements to FBI agents and the grand jury were designed to prevent investigators from learning who else at the White House was involved in what would amount to a criminal conspiracy to disclose national security secrets to discredit an administration critic.
The more innocent explanation is that Libby’s alleged misstatements “assuming they were intentional” were aimed at heading off political embarrassment, rather than covering up criminality at the White House. “He knew it would be embarrassing politically if the government even accidentally and innocently was the source of [the leak of the agent’s name],” Rothstein says.
Many are likely to embrace the nefarious explanation, Rothstein says, but the actions of the special counsel in declining to charge anyone with illegally disclosing secrets suggest the innocent explanation may be closer to the truth.
“This will all come out in the trial,” Rothstein says.
If it comes out to be — to cut away all the niceties — a just plain, dumb action, will some argue that perjury doesn’t matter? The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward seemingly argued as much on Larry King:
First of all this began not as somebody launching a smear campaign that it actually — when the story comes out I’m quite confident we’re going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter and that somebody learned that Joe Wilson’s wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job going to Niger to see if there was an Iraq/Niger uranium deal.
And, there’s a lot of innocent actions in all of this but what has happened this prosecutor, I mean I used to call Mike Isikoff when he worked at the “Washington Post” the junkyard dog. Well this is a junkyard dog prosecutor and he goes everywhere and asks every question and turns over rocks and rocks under rocks and so forth.
KING: And doesn’t leak.
WOODWARD: And it doesn’t leak and I think it’s quite possible that though probably unlikely that he will say, you know, there was no malice or criminal intent at the start of this. Some people kind of had convenient memories before the grand jury. Technically they might be able to be charged with perjury.
But I don’t see an underlying crime here and the absence of the underlying crime may cause somebody who is a really thoughtful prosecutor to say, you know, maybe this is not one to go to the court with.
But it is going to court…and the issue of perjury (and whether a pass should be given to someone because they’re on “our” side or cooperate with us in other ways) will be out there. Will the bulk of Americans buy the idea that the Winking Disease so prevalent in the Harriet Miers nomination be allowed to flourish in the case of a top White House aide? Or will they insist that perjury is perjury — and that if some folks don’t like it, then they need to change the law or eliminate it from the lawbooks?
And the Libby defense? It will reportedly boil down to three words “I can’t recall.”:
Washington – The lawyer for US vice president Dick Cheney’s former top aide is outlining a possible criminal defense that is a time-honoured tradition in Washington scandals: A busy official immersed in important duties cannot reasonably be expected to remember details of long-ago conversations.
Friday’s indictment of I Lewis “Scooter” Libby involves allegations that as Cheney’s chief of staff he lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury.
Libby, who resigned immediately, was operating amid “the hectic rush of issues and events at a busy time for our government,” according to a statement released by his attorney, Joseph Tate.
“We are quite distressed the special counsel (Patrick Fitzgerald) has not sought to pursue alleged inconsistencies in Mr Libby’s recollection and those of others and to charge such inconsistencies as false statements,” Tate continued.
“As lawyers, we recognize that a person’s recollection and memory of events will not always match those of other people, particularly when they are asked to testify months after the events occurred.”
The lack-of-memory defence has worked with varying degrees of success in controversies from Iran-Contra to Whitewater.
That’ll be a far different issue, and played out in the courtroom, than arguments by some partisans, newspapers and even journalists that a little thing like perjury in a small case doesn’t matter. If that is the case, then why don’t courts simply stop giving oaths before sworn testimony?
And the political context? This all comes within The Perfect Storm for Bush and the GOP over the past few months: the federal government’s generally-panned performance during Hurricane Katrina, conservatives showing remarkable assertiveness training in beating back the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination, the P.R. fiasco of the staged military press conference, the axing of progressive talker Ed Schultz from a planned debut on Armed Forces Radio after he just coincidentally featured and criticized the rehearsed military press conference (the call to his show telling them they would not be on AFRN came from the same person he had criticized on his show — reportedly a political appointee), and the 2000+ deaths in Iraq.
Even smatterings of good news can’t outweigh the perception that the administration either has its best days behind it or it’s going to have to reinvent itself with some new faces and some people walking out the exit door. If the Plame case goes on, the Special Prosecutor may help escort some people towards the exit.
UPDATE: The Raw Story says Rove is hardly in the clear…which means Friday’s press conference was perhaps the beginning and not the end of something far larger:
‘Bush’s brain’ is not Novak’s ‘secret source.’ He is, however, the senior administration official who said, “Oh, you know about it,” when asked by the columnist about Wilson’s wife sending him to Niger.
Novak wrote, “When I called another official for confirmation, he said: ‘Oh, you know about it.'”
Rove’s role in the case remains unclear. Those familiar with the investigation say that Rove remains in legal limbo and that Fitzgerald has not finished his inquiry into Bush’s chief advisor’s role.
Rove may be called on to testify against Libby in the latter’s trial.
“This investigation is not yet over,� one of the lawyers in the case said. “You must keep in mind that people like Mr. Rove are still under investigation.�
A source close to Rove told the Washington Post, “There is still the chance that Mr. Rove could face indictment.” Lawyers involved in the case said Fitzgerald is likely to put pressure on Libby to provide evidence against Rove or other potential targets.
UPDATE II: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
The indictment Friday of Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide and the continuing investigation into the president’s most trusted adviser isn’t just a dark legal cloud for the White House.
It puts a bright spotlight on one of the president’s biggest current political problems-the war in Iraq.
The charges against Libby have revived questions about the White House’s justification for the war. Meanwhile, the involvement of Bush’s top aide, Karl Rove, in the ongoing CIA leak case remains an open question.
UPDATE III: The New Republic‘s blog warns those who are expecting this trial to derail the Bush administration to think again and asks what all the fuss was about:
Well, that was much ado about nothing. I don’t really think the indictment of the man who served as the Vice President’s Chief of Staff–and whose role in the administration was in fact much larger than that–is no big deal. It is. But the way Democrats were talking about this case leading up to the indictment, this has to come as a letdown. After all, liberals believed that Patrick Fitzgerald was going to cripple the Bush administration and reveal the lies and deceptions behind the Iraq war. There was speculation that Fitzgerald would shine a bright, unflattering light onto the inner workings of the White House Iraq Group. There was talk that he was going to name a “Constitutional officer”–namely Cheney–as an unindicted co-conspirator. And there were rumors that he was seeking to empanel a second grand jury to investigate who ginned up the fake “Niger documents.”
Maybe Fitzgerald just has a very impressive poker face, but it sure seemed from his press conference that none of those things is now going to happen.