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Scooter Libby Sentence Commuted

A

Anonymous

Guest
"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 30 months in prison."

I wonder why he can think its his duty to protect this employee from excessive sentencing, when he refused/refuses to do the same with his employees ( Border Patrolmen ) that are in prison on grossly excessive prosecution/sentences for doing their job and protecting our border from drug smuggling illegal aliens... :???: :( :mad: :mad:

This will not help the Republican effort for 08....
 

Texan

Well-known member
There is nothing whatsoever to be gained by Scooter Libby being in jail. Nothing. But...

....what's good for the Border Patrol guys should be good for Scooter Libby. He should have had to wait until all of the appeals were exhausted.

I disagreed with his sentence, but that was the decision by the court and nobody should be above the law. This really smells rotten. I'm very disappointed in my President for this.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Texan said:
There is nothing whatsoever to be gained by Scooter Libby being in jail. Nothing. But...

....what's good for the Border Patrol guys should be good for Scooter Libby. He should have had to wait until all of the appeals were exhausted.

I disagreed with his sentence, but that was the decision by the court and nobody should be above the law. This really smells rotten. I'm very disappointed in my President for this.

AMEN-- very hypocritical of a US President in the treatment of his employees--except this administration has continually presented an air of arrogance which played to the favors of the rich, wealthy, powerful, and Corporates--but left out and forgot the common guy/working man...

Too bad these Border Patrolmen that were putting their lives on the line to protect our border fit into the "commoner" class and deserve different treatment in this Presidents/Administrations eye.... :( :( :mad: :mad:
 

kolanuraven

Well-known member
#1...Libby should have NEVER been prosecuted in the first place. He was just doing what he was told to do...this trail leads right back to Cheney's door!

#2...Eventhough I AGREE WITH BUSH in this commutation... he should have given him a full pardon. Once again...Bush did something half way. This way, as it stands, the man remains a felon...looses his law licenses and still has to pay the fine, ( which Cheney will dig that out of the couch cushions in his office)

#3...Makes ya wonder what Cheney has on Bush to make his walk such a thin line as this and to by pass all channels of normal procedure??????

And Don...your 16 yr old got it right !!!!
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
ARCAMAX's Doonesbury cartoon for today is kind of sadly funny- altho daily it appears to be more the truth- the new Globalist neocon corporate branch that has forgot the US Constitution exists in favor of the greed for the world economic dominance:

Interview with Dick Cheney

Reporter: Mr. Cheney, Why won't your office obey a White House order to account for classified information?

Mr. Cheney: As I just explained I'm not part of the Executive branch. I'm my own branch, a Super secret branch!!!

Reporter: But aren't there only three branches of government?

Mr. Cheney: Correct- Bush, Me, and the Court that brung us.

Reporter: What about Congress?

Mr. Cheney: Oh please--Thats just a fairy tale for school children!!!
 

aplusmnt

Well-known member
I agree with either commuting his sentence or Pardon, but agree with Texan that the same rules should apply to the Border Patrolman as Scooter.
 

Cal

Well-known member
aplusmnt said:
I agree with either commuting his sentence or Pardon, but agree with Texan that the same rules should apply to the Border Patrolman as Scooter.
Dittos, I didn't realize that nothing had progressed with the Border Patrolmen. That deal stinks to high heaven. I also hope that Bush didn't believe a helluva lot that Vladmir Putin had to say, either, during their little powwow.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Cal said:
aplusmnt said:
I agree with either commuting his sentence or Pardon, but agree with Texan that the same rules should apply to the Border Patrolman as Scooter.
Dittos, I didn't realize that nothing had progressed with the Border Patrolmen. That deal stinks to high heaven. I also hope that Bush didn't believe a helluva lot that Vladmir Putin had to say, either, during their little powwow.

Interesting comment:
The special counsel had this to say yesterday after President Bush commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence: "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 sentencing which occur every day throughout this country...IT IS FUNDAMENTAL TO THE RULE OF LAW THAT ALL CITIZENS STAND BEFORE THE BAR OF JUSTICE AS EQUALS."

Apparently the President does not believe that applies to his staff. Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice. But because of who he is (or what they're afraid he may turn songbird on), Scooter Libby will not serve one day in jail- while the Border Patrolmen that put their lives on the line still sit in Prison....... :( :mad:
 

Steve

Well-known member
making false statements and obstruction of justice.

Is not the special counsel just as guilty of obstruction of justice?

The special counsel knew who leaked the Plame identity and failed to tell the truth...then a reporter sat in jail because he "advised Armatage not to discus the matter"...and the investigation dragged out for years costing the American taxpayers millions....

didn't that obstruct justice more? wasn't his with-holding the truth as bad?...or his bilking the taxpayers out of millions, isn't that fraud?...how much time is the Special counsel serving?



He [Armitage] says he was reading Novak's newspaper column again, on Oct. 1, 2003, and "he [Novak] said he was told by a non-partisan gun slinger."
"I almost immediately called Secretary Powell and said, 'I'm sure that was me,'" Armitage says. Armitage immediately met with FBI agents investigating the leak."
"I told them that I was the inadvertent leak," Armitage says. He didn't get a lawyer, however....Armitage says he didn't come forward because "the special counsel, once he was appointed, asked me not to discuss this and I honored his request."
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Steve said:
making false statements and obstruction of justice.

Is not the special counsel just as guilty of obstruction of justice?

The special counsel knew who leaked the Plame identity and failed to tell the truth...then a reporter sat in jail because he "advised Armatage not to discus the matter"...and the investigation dragged out for years costing the American taxpayers millions....

didn't that obstruct justice more? wasn't his with-holding the truth as bad?...or his bilking the taxpayers out of millions, isn't that fraud?...how much time is the Special counsel serving?



He [Armitage] says he was reading Novak's newspaper column again, on Oct. 1, 2003, and "he [Novak] said he was told by a non-partisan gun slinger."
"I almost immediately called Secretary Powell and said, 'I'm sure that was me,'" Armitage says. Armitage immediately met with FBI agents investigating the leak."
"I told them that I was the inadvertent leak," Armitage says. He didn't get a lawyer, however....Armitage says he didn't come forward because "the special counsel, once he was appointed, asked me not to discuss this and I honored his request."

Steve-- How about the prosecuters in the Border Patrol Case-- and the Dept of Homeland Security both of which hid evidence and did not disclose pertinent info- like the fact the poor little drug smuggler was busted a second time after receiving amnesty for smuggling drugs- and the fact that the BP's supervisors were at the scene and advised them of what to do.... :???:

No what this does is create a huge STINK, which is the reason you see the politicians polls at where they are...I don't care if its a (D) or a (R) involved- what this does is further erode our justice system-- and make a farce of the concept that ALL CITIZENS STAND BEFORE THE BAR OF JUSTICE AS EQUALS....



Bush Rationale on Libby Stirs Legal Debate


By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: July 4, 2007
In commuting I. Lewis Libby Jr.’s 30-month prison sentence on Monday, President Bush drew on the same array of arguments about the federal sentencing system often made by defense lawyers — and routinely and strenuously opposed by his own Justice Department.


Bush Is Said to Have Held Long Debate on Decision (July 4, 2007)
Bill Clinton Criticizes Bush on Libby Move (July 4, 2007) Critics of the system have a long list of complaints. Sentences, they say, are too harsh. Judges are allowed to take account of facts not proven to the jury. The defendant’s positive contributions are ignored, as is the collateral damage that imprisonment causes the families involved.

On Monday, Mr. Bush made use of every element of that critique in a detailed statement setting out his reasons for commuting Mr. Libby’s sentence — handing an unexpected gift to defense lawyers around the country, who scrambled to make use of the president’s arguments in their own cases.

Given the administration’s tough stand on sentencing, the president’s arguments left experts in sentencing law scratching their heads.

“The Bush administration, in some sense following the leads of three previous administrations, has repeatedly supported a federal sentencing system that is distinctly disrespectful of the very arguments that Bush has put forward in cutting Libby a break,” said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University who writes the blog Sentencing Law and Policy.

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Bush’s decision to grant a commutation rather than an outright pardon has started a national conversation about sentencing generally.

“By saying that the sentence was excessive, I wonder if he understood the ramifications of saying that,” said Ellen S. Podgor, who teaches criminal law at Stetson University in St. Petersburg, Fla. “This is opening up a can of worms about federal sentencing.”

The Libby clemency will be the basis for many legal arguments, said Susan James, an Alabama lawyer representing Don E. Siegelman, the state’s former governor, who is appealing a sentence he received last week of 88 months for obstruction of justice and other offenses.

“It’s far more important than if he’d just pardoned Libby,” Ms. James said, as forgiving a given offense as an act of executive grace would have had only political repercussions. “What you’re going to see is people like me quoting President Bush in every pleading that comes across every federal judge’s desk.”

Indeed, Mr. Bush’s decision may have given birth to a new sort of legal document.

“I anticipate that we’re going to get a new motion called ‘the Libby motion,’ ” Professor Podgor said. “It will basically say, ‘My client should have got what Libby got, and here’s why.’

As a purely legal matter, of course, Mr. Bush’s statement has no particular force outside Mr. Libby’s case. But that does not mean judges will necessarily ignore it.

No one disputes that Mr. Bush has the authority under the Constitution to issue pardons and commutations for federal crimes. But experts in the area, pointing to political scandals in the Reagan, Truman and Grant administrations, said Mr. Bush had acted with unusual speed.

“What distinguishes Scooter Libby from the acts of clemency in the other three episodes,” said P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor who studies pardons at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., referring to Mr. Libby by his nickname, “is that in those episodes they generally served their time and some other president pardoned them.”

Mr. Bush repeated yesterday that he had found Mr. Libby’s punishment to be too severe. But experts in federal sentencing law said a sentence of 30 months for lying and obstruction was consistent with the tough sentences routinely meted out by the federal system.

“On what legal basis could he have reached that result?” asked Frank O. Bowman III, an authority on federal sentencing who teaches law at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said of the commutation. “There is no legal basis.”

Nor is there a reason to think that the Justice Department has changed its position about the sentencing system generally. Indeed, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said last month that the department would push for legislation making federal sentences tougher and less flexible.
Similarly, in a case decided two weeks ago by the United States Supreme Court and widely discussed by legal specialists in light of the Libby case, the Justice Department persuaded the court to affirm the 33-month sentence of a defendant whose case closely resembled that against Mr. Libby. The defendant, Victor A. Rita, was, like Mr. Libby, convicted of perjury, making false statements to federal agents and obstruction of justice.Mr. Rita has performed extensive government service, just as Mr. Libby has. Mr. Rita served in the armed forces for more than 25 years, receiving 35 commendations, awards and medals. Like Mr. Libby, Mr. Rita had no criminal history for purposes of the federal sentencing guidelines.

The judges who sentenced the two men increased their sentences by taking account of the crimes about which they lied. Mr. Rita’s perjury concerned what the court called “a possible violation of a machine-gun registration law”; Mr. Libby’s of a possible violation of a federal law making it a crime to disclose the identities of undercover intelligence agents in some circumstances.

When Mr. Rita argued that his 33-month sentence had failed to consider his history and circumstances adequately, the Justice Department strenuously disagreed.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, posted a copy of the government’s brief in the Rita case on his blog yesterday and asked, “Why is the president flip-flopping on these criminal justice decisions?”

The Justice Department also took a hard line last year in the case of Jamie Olis, a midlevel executive at the energy company Dynegy convicted of accounting fraud. The department argued that Mr. Olis deserved 292 months, or more than 24 years. He was sentenced to six years.

Sentencing experts said Mr. Libby’s sentence was both tough and in line with general trends.

“It was a pretty harsh sentence,” Professor Berman said, “because I tend to view any term of imprisonment for nonviolent first offenses as harsh. But it certainly wasn’t out of the normal array of cases I see every day.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/washington/04commute.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1183608287-ubH7ERyYo1dy9hB5xwyBug
 

kolanuraven

Well-known member
BUT....you all are forgetting the promise that Bush made to ' fire anyone' connected to the 'leak'...REMEMBER THAT???


Well, then why is Carl Rove still on the payroll????


I don't know who's the bigger pimp here, Rove or Cheney?
 

Steve

Well-known member
Steve-- How about the prosecuters in the Border Patrol Case-- and the Dept of Homeland Security both of which hid evidence and did not disclose pertinent info- like the fact the poor little drug smuggler was busted a second time after receiving amnesty for smuggling drugs-

I totally agree,..and have posted my disgust at that situation repeatedly...

but the fact remains,...the special counsel knew from day one of his task that it was Armatage....he with-held that information,...and obstructed justice.

Had he done his job it would have been a one day investigation,..a press release,.. and more then likely no book deal...
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Steve said:
but the fact remains,...the special counsel knew from day one of his task that it was Armatage....he with-held that information,...and obstructed justice.

Had he done his job it would have been a one day investigation,..a press release,.. and more then likely no book deal...

There I disagree... In many criminal cases you have folks coming forward- making admissions or false confessions- for many different reasons...Sometimes its relatives or associates trying to lead you away from the true perpetrator, and sometimes its just some nut, looking for their moment of fame- or whatever...A good example is the fella that has tryed to confess to the Jon Benet Ramsey death......

An admission alone is worthless- and the investigation needs to go forward to find the facts and the evidence that can show it is a true confession- and that the circumstances/facts existed to make the admission/confession plausible/capable...And I know no prosecuters that put a lot of stake in a confession alone- as they can change as time goes on and are impeachable...The reason the need to still find witnesses, and factual and circumstantial evidence, that can prove or disprove the confession and the illegal act itself......

The prosecuter would have been derilict in his duty if he'd have taken the first admission that came forward- without thoroughly looking to ascertain that it was indeed true and that there was no one else involved....
 

backhoeboogie

Well-known member
Oldtimer said:
The prosecuter would have been derilict in his duty if he'd have taken the first admission that came forward- without thoroughly looking to ascertain that it was indeed true and that there was no one else involved....

Everything else rests with a jury of peers. That is the tragedy here. The peers see what is happening in special cases. They (collectively) have the ability to fully pardon anyone themselves.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
I agree with this author-- this commutation ( and upcoming Pardon after the 08 election) is a coverup-- and a way to keep Libby or any others in the Administration from turning States evidence to save their butts..."If the 'Godfather' has power of pardon- you don't have to worry about no stinking courts or juries threats"....

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July 06, 2007
An Unpardonable Act
By E. J. Dionne

I harbored no personal desire to see I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby spend a long time in prison for his perjury and obstruction of justice convictions. People who know him tell me he is a thoughtful and interesting man, and I have no reason to doubt them.

Yet when I learned that President Bush had commuted Libby's 30-month sentence, I was enraged although not surprised. Rage should not be a standard response to political events (though avoiding it has gotten harder in recent years), so I had to ask if my anger was justified. Here's the case for getting mad, and staying mad.

The core point is that "equal justice under law" either means something or it doesn't. In this case, all the facts we know tell us that Libby received far more than equal justice, evidenced by the irregular way his commutation was handled.

President Bush's rationale for commuting Libby's sentence was based precisely on arguments that have been, as The New York Times reported on Wednesday, "routinely and strenuously opposed by his own Justice Department."

"Given the administration's tough stand on sentencing," the Times' Adam Liptak wrote, "the president's arguments left experts in sentencing law scratching their heads."

After you've finished your head-scratching, is it possible to avoid the conclusion that this was a one-time-only action rooted not in law, but in politics and favoritism for an aide who loyally misled the prosecution in a case that implicated top figures of Bush's own administration?

Bush said Libby's sentence was excessive. But as Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported, "the 2 1/2 years handed Libby was much like the sentences given others convicted in obstruction cases."

In fairness, Fournier also pointed to a certain inconsistency on the issue of perjury on the Democratic side (Bill Clinton and all that). Ed Morrissey, a staunch conservative who runs the influential Captain's Quarters blog, also went after the Clintons, but Morrissey's own sense of consistency wouldn't allow him to embrace Bush's decision. "I'm not convinced that the administration should have intervened at all," Morrissey wrote. "The sentence fit within the sentencing guidelines championed by Republicans for years as a bulwark against soft-on-crime federal judges, even if it was on the long end of the guidelines by some interpretations. The underlying crimes go to the heart of the rule of law, and those who commit perjury and obstruction should go to prison."

If Bush had been confident that the law was on his side, he might have sought input on the decision from his Justice Department. He did no such thing.

As Michael Abramowitz reported in Tuesday's Washington Post: "For the first time in his presidency, Bush commuted a sentence without running requests through lawyers at the Justice Department, White House officials said. He also did not ask the chief prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, for his input, as routinely happens in cases routed through the Justice Department's pardon attorney." Again: this was a one-time-only ticket for one guy.

Bush purported to be seeking a "third way" (forgive me, Tony Blair) between an outright pardon and allowing the law to follow its course. "I respect the jury's verdict," the president said. "But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. ... The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant and private citizen will be long-lasting."

But if Bush truly meant that, he'd declare that a full pardon for Libby is out of the question. The day after he commuted Libby's sentence, Bush explicitly refused to do so. Moving back to stonewalling, the president said, "As to the future, I rule nothing in or nothing out."

Notice the pattern: When the heat was on in the CIA leak case, Bush issued a strong pledge to fire anybody involved in leaking. He didn't. When Libby was indicted, Bush ducked any comment until Libby was at prison's door. Now, by keeping Libby free, Bush can conveniently postpone a full pardon until after the 2008 election. In the meantime, Libby has no incentive to tell prosecutors anything new about what happened in this case. As liberal blogs have noted, since he was not pardoned outright, he can use the pending appeal of his conviction to avoid testifying before Congress.

It's an airtight cover-up made possible by the administration's willingness to bend the law. We spent months talking about Clinton's pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich. This commutation is an even greater outrage because it involves the administration taking steps to slip accountability for its own actions. Are we just going to let this one go by?
 
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