The President has commuted the sentence of Scooter Libby, the administration official who lied to investigators trying to uncover who leaked the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. He still has to pay a fine (or rather, have some ‘friends of Bush’ pay the fine), still has a criminal record (which will obviously prevent him getting a job with a friend of Bush), and has to serve probation (there go his plans for holding up the local Kwik-E-Mart).
As Josh Marshall and others have pointed out, going to prison might have changed Libby’s views on telling what he knows. Being pardoned would have prevented him from pleading the fifth in any Congressional investigation. What a coincidence, then, that the President found a happy medium.
I’ll leave the last word for the prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald:
We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.
We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as “excessive.†The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.
Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.