Scooter Libby's Tragedy

Even in the liberal euphoria over the conviction of I. Lewis Libby, I remain somewhat contrarian, because I am still of the opinion that he was, indeed, a sacrificial lamb. And a sacrificial lamb who was not nearly so culpable as the people higher up whose positions Libby decided to protect.

I'm sorry his lawyer didn't follow up on his good instincts; in his opening statement, he told the truth when he described Libby as a "fall guy," the one set up to take the rap for the misprisions of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. According to the account of the loquacious juror who has described the deliberations of the jury, Ted Wells's claim resonated with the jurors. That's the way they saw it too. They were waiting for evidence they could sink their teeth into. But in the final analysis, Wells blinked, or his client (following his inclinations toward omerta to the end) would not allow him to prove the claim. I don't know which it was. Clearly, the decision to portray Libby as a flunkie sent to do a dirty job and then abandoned when his journalist sources blew his cover story -- that's a major fork in the road. If you go down that road, if you take the Vice President, maybe the President, directly on, your life will never be the same. Wells knew that. I think that's why he sat, immobile, his face in his hands, while Fitzgerald tore his defense to pieces. The jury wasn't going to buy this "faulty memory" routine and Wells knew it.

He had a better case to make. His pitch was the time-honored strategem of jury nullification. Give the jury the red meat they want and they'll overlook the law. There was no doubt that Libby lied, several times. Yet it is also true, no matter how strenuously Fitzgerald argued to the contrary in his own press conference (he doth, in fact, protest too much), that the lies did not amount to a legal hill of beans. Who on God's green Earth cares whether Libby learned about Valerie Plame's job at the CIA on June 12 or on July 13? Fitzgerald again today would not answer one fundamental question: did anyone do anything wrong by disclosing classified information or the identity of an undercover agent in the summer of 2003? If so, why didn't you charge them? And if they didn't do anything wrong, if it was perfectly legal to tell anyone and everyone who our undercover agents working on weapons of mass destruction are -- if that's your position, Mr. Fitzgerald (and you won't tell us it isn't) then WHO CARES when one of the guys in the Bush Administration who's doing the blabbing also makes up a story about when he first heard about it? And this sanctimonious stuff about the integrity of the "system" and the search for justice, how it all depends on truth-telling, and the rest of it- please. A couple of hundred million 1040's will be signed under oath in the next six months or so. What's the over/under on instances of perjury in that pile of paperwork, Mr. Fitzgerald? Fifty million? One hundred million?

I don't think Scooter Libby is a bad guy. It's just my sense. I think he's a good and ethical man who was working for a bad and unethical man, and he threw his life away burning the trail which would have led back to Cheney's manipulations. Yet even in that misguided act of loyalty he failed completely. It all came out anyway. One thing that speaks well for Scooter Libby is that he's such a lousy liar. Under the oppressive heat of a federal investigation, all he could come up with was "I forgot." The thing he forgot was himself, who he once was, and for that he'll pay a terrible price.