The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage

[Jefferson23]

By PETER BAKER

In the final days of his presidency, George W. Bush sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum and staring into the distance as two White House lawyers briefed him on the possible last-minute pardon of I. Lewis Libby.

“Do you think he did it?” Bush asked.

“Yeah,” one of the lawyers said. “I think he did it.”

In March 2007, Libby, who had served as Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, was convicted of lying to federal officials who were investigating the leak of the identity of a C.I.A. officer. For the past two months Cheney had been pushing the president to grant Libby a full pardon before they left office. He would not let it go. Cheney brought it up again and again, first before Thanksgiving, then again around Christmas and finally throughout January 2009 as they prepared for the transition to the incoming Obama administration. His lobbying was so intense that the president made clear to his aides that he did not want to talk with Cheney about it anymore.

Troubled by the decision hanging over him, Bush had asked the White House lawyers to re-examine the case to see if a pardon was justified. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and his deputy, William Burck, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers had raised in his defense. Their conclusion was that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty.

“If I were on that jury,” Burck told Bush, “I would probably have agreed with them. You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that’s a crime.”

The case had its origins in the politically fraught summer of 2003, when American troops had just invaded Iraq but were unable to find the unconventional weapons they had been told were there. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, suggested that the White House ignored contrary evidence about Iraq’s nuclear program in the months before the invasion, a charge Cheney would deny. When the news media reported that Wilson’s wife worked at the C.I.A., the F.B.I. opened an investigation into whether her identity was illegally divulged.

remainder: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/the-final-insult-in-the-bush-cheney-marriage.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

[jberryhill]

1. Will they be returning the wedding gifts?

[Jefferson23]

4. Well, looking at what people do versus what they say:

*But inside, the new library suggested a different reality. There were exhibits featuring the first lady and their daughters, videos narrated by Rice, Bolten and Andy Card, and even statues of the presidential dogs. There was little sign of Dick Cheney.

[TwilightGardener]

2. I imagine Junior curled up into a little ball under the Oval Office desk

hiding from Uncle Dick and his "intense lobbying".

[SDjack]

3. Shrub doesn't bird hunt with Darth V. anymore -- doesn't want

to be shot in face, butt, or gonads.

[Frustratedlady]

5. Cheney only wanted a pardon to cleanse his conscience,

although I doubt he had one.

VP Cheney is the one who should have been sentenced. He gave the orders.

[gopiscrap]

7. Exactly

[Ash_F]

6. Bush still commuted all of the prison time, didn't he? /nt

[Jefferson23]

8. He certainly did:

"I respect the jury's verdict," Bush said in a statement. "But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/07/02/bush-commutes-scooter-libby-prison-sentence/