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Thursday, March 08, 2007

About that pardon....
Posted by Jill | 6:51 AM
Now that the conservative punditocracy has decided that the only time perjury counts is when it has to do with a sex act and a Democratic president; not outing a non-official cover CIA agent investigating nuclear weapons in a country the president wants to attack for developing nuclear weapons, said punditocracy is now screaming for a pardon.

There's just one problem: Scooter Libby doesn't qualify for one:

Following the furor over President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich (among others), Bush made it clear he wasn’t interested in granting many pardons. “We were basically told [by then White House counsel and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales] that there weren’t going to be pardons—or if there were, there would be very few,” recalls one former White House lawyer who asked not to be identified talking about internal matters.

The president has since indicated he intended to go by the book in granting what few pardons he’d hand out—considering only requests that had first been reviewed by the Justice Department under a series of publicly available guidelines.

Those regulations, which are discussed on the Justice Department Web site at www.usdoj.gov/pardon, would seem to make a Libby pardon a nonstarter in George W. Bush’s White House. They “require a petitioner to wait a period of at least five years after conviction or release from confinement (whichever is later) before filing a pardon application,” according to the Justice Web site.

[snip]

Moreover, in weighing whether to recommend a pardon, U.S. attorneys are supposed to consider whether an applicant is remorseful. “The extent to which a petitioner has accepted responsibility for his or her criminal conduct and made restitution to ... victims are important considerations. A petitioner should be genuinely desirous of forgiveness rather than vindication,” the Justice Web site states.

Of course, there is nothing that requires Bush to follow these guidelines in reviewing a pardon for Libby (whose lawyer, Ted Wells, stated on the courthouse steps Tuesday that he intended to push for a retrial, adding that he has “every confidence that Mr. Libby will be vindicated.”) As Love, the former pardon attorney, points out, “the president can do whatever he wants.” Both Clinton and Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush (who pardoned Casper Weinberger among other Iran-contra figures), bear that out.

Still, Bush himself publicly reaffirmed his determination to stick to the Justice pardon guidelines as recently as last month. In a Feb. 1 interview with Fox News anchor Neal Cavuto, Bush was asked about whether he would pardon Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two former U.S. Border Patrol agents convicted of shooting a Mexican drug dealer who was fleeing across the border into Mexico.

[snip]

“I’m saying … there is a process in any case for a president to make a pardon decisions. In other words, there is a series of steps that are followed, so that the pardon process is, you know, a rational process,” the president answered.

Doug Berman, a Ohio State University law professor who specializes in pardons, said the president may have just been pointing to the Justice Department process as a way to “avoid responsibility” for the political flap over the Border Patrol agents’ case. But Bush has always used his pardon power sparingly—dating back to his days in the Texas governor’s mansion.


Of course, given this president's belief that he doesn't need no es-teenking guidelines, or laws, or the Constitution, or anything else that might stand in his way of doing exactly what he wants, none of this is really significant. If he wants to pardon Libby, he'll do so. The question is whether he is willing to tarnish the glorious legacy he still believes he will have by issuing a pardon -- and just how much Dick Cheney is going to be able to strongarm him into doing so.

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