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March 08, 2007
The US news is that former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted Tuesday of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI in an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and a well-connected neoconservative, was accused of lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.
I presume that there will be political damage resulting from this trial.
Andrew Sullivan comments
Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president's office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about - what it has always been about - is whether this administration deliberately misled the American people about WMD intelligence before the war. The risks Cheney took to attack Wilson, the insane over-reaction that otherwise very smart men in this administration engaged in to rebut a relatively trivial issue: all this strongly implies the fact they were terrified that the full details of their pre-war WMD knowledge would come out. Fitzgerald could smell this. He was right to pursue it, and to prove that a brilliant, intelligent, sane man like Libby would risk jail to protect his bosses. What was he really trying to hide?
This conviction breaks the pattern of the Bush administration being mostly insulated from aggressive congressional oversight and prosecutorial investigation. The rule of law has claimed on of its own, despite the Bush's administration radical theories of executive power and the unprecedented wall of secrecy behind which it has operated.
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