Trump's 'Scooter' Libby Pardon Sends a Message to Witnesses in Mueller Probe

By James Hohmann, The Washington Post

14 April 18

 

HE BIG IDEA: 

President Trump's pardon of Lewis “Scooter” Libby is the latest signal to his associates that he has the power and inclination to reward those who stay loyal during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

“I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Trump said in a statement released midday, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.”

Libby was convicted of four felonies, including obstruction of justice and perjury before a grand jury, related to the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame during his time as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000.

After talk of the pardon broke early this morning, Richard Painter, who was the chief ethics lawyer in George W. Bush's White House from 2005 to 2007, tweeted: “So what’s the message here? Lie to a grand jury to protect political superiors and you will get a full pardon?”

Remember, Trump’s lawyer reportedly told attorneys representing Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn last year that the president might be willing to pardon his former senior aides if they faced criminal charges stemming from the investigation into Russia’s election interference.

-- Trump has already rewarded one political ally with a pardon. Last August, the president used the power invested in him by the Constitution to pardon Joe Arpaio. He developed a kinship with the ex-Arizona sheriff when they were prominent leaders of the “birther” movement, which falsely accused Barack Obama of being from Kenya. Arpaio campaigned with Trump in Iowa before the caucuses and stayed loyal to him during the depths of the campaign, which might have been a factor in him losing reelection in November 2016.

Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt of court for defying a federal judge’s order to stop racially profiling Latinos. His deputies were detaining people simply because they suspected them of being undocumented immigrants. One reason the pardon was unusual is that it was handed down before Arpaio’s sentencing and the appeals process played out.

Arpaio thanked the president on Twitter at the time “for seeing my conviction for what it is: a political witch hunt by holdovers in the Obama justice department!’”

A decade ago, many conservatives also described the prosecution of Libby as a “witch hunt.” “The right’s narrative about Libby — that he was railroaded by an overreaching, politically-driven special prosecutor — syncs with Trump’s view of his own predicament,” notes Kyle Swenson. “‘A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!’ the president has tweeted about the Mueller investigation.”

-- There’s a Comey connection here: Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the Plame affair, which left the decision on how to proceed to then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. Comey appointed his longtime friend and colleague Patrick J. Fitzgerald to become the special counsel. It was Fitzgerald who convicted Libby. There’s no way Libby’s defenders haven’t put this bug in the president’s ear.

Trump just called Comey a “slime ball” on Twitter. The ousted FBI director’s memoir comes out next Tuesday, and cable news this morning is dominated by coverage of what it says. (keep reading for much more on the book):

-- ABC, which broke the news about Libby, reports that “the president has already signed off on the pardon.” Several other outlets, including The Washington Post, quickly got confirmation. Two people familiar with the president’s thinking told our Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker that the pardon has been under consideration for several months. One senior administration official told them that Trump could always change his mind, and the timing for the formal announcement is unclear.

-- Bigger picture, Trump continues to be a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do president. He constantly rails against leaks, yet he’s pardoning someone who was convicted of lying about leaking sensitive national security information. Judith Miller, then a reporter for the New York Times, spent 85 days in prison rather than disclose Libby was one of her sources.

-- A potential pardon once again puts into stark relief Trump’s bitterness toward the career professionals at the FBI and CIA, who the president sees as part of a “deep state” conspiring against him.

-- It’s also another data point of Trump’s disdain for the rule of law. Libby unsuccessfully appealed his conviction. He was convicted by a jury.

-- Furthermore, this shows Trump does not believe someone must be contrite to get a pardon. Historically, that’s been a requirement or at least a norm.

-- The president was late to embrace Libby’s cause. When a conservative reporter asked in 2015 if he’d ever pardon him, Trump appeared unfamiliar with the specifics of the case and dismissed the question as “not pertinent.”

-- In that respect, this might be another indication of John Bolton’s growing influence: Proximity is power in any White House, but it’s especially true with Trump. Bolton, who started Monday as national security adviser, is close friends with Libby and a longtime Cheney loyalist. A 2009 story in the New York Times quoted Bolton on the record and said he had “broken with the president in recent years, in part over Mr. Libby’s case.” This may have been in the pipeline for a while, but it’s possible Bolton helped seal the deal.

Bolton continues to clean house. Deputy national security adviser Ricky Waddell just became the fourth official under his domain to call it quits this week. “Senior White House officials said other personnel changes could happen in the coming days on the National Security Council,” Josh Dawsey and Greg Jaffe report. “One former senior administration official called him a ‘steady hand and a workhorse.’ But he was not known to have a particularly close relationship with Trump.”

-- Another longtime, very vocal advocate for pardoning Libby has been attorney Joe diGenova. He was poised to join Trump’s legal team last month, but it didn’t happen after they had a face-to-face meeting. The two have stayed in touch, though, and diGenova said publicly that Trump should fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein this week – less than 24 hours after speaking with the president.

-- Libby avoided serving hard time because Bush commuted his prison sentence, but the then-president saw a pardon as a bridge too far. He resisted intense pressure from Cheney to pardon Libby during the final days of his term, which permanently soured their relationship. Bush was mindful of the blow his father’s reputation took for pardoning former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other former government officials involved in the Iran-contra affair after losing the 1992 election. He also remembered the blowback Bill Clinton faced for his 11th hour pardons of politically connected people like Marc Rich in 2001.

-- “A pardon of Mr. Libby would paradoxically put Mr. Trump in the position of absolving one of the chief architects of the Iraq war, which Mr. Trump has denounced as a catastrophic miscalculation,” Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman note on the front page of the Times. “Mr. Bush assigned White House lawyers to examine the case, but they advised him the jury had ample reason to convict Mr. Libby and the president rebuffed Mr. Cheney’s request. Mr. Bush told aides that he suspected that Mr. Libby had thought he was protecting Mr. Cheney, the real target of the investigation.

“Mr. Cheney snapped at Mr. Bush. ‘You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle,’ he told him when informed of the decision. Mr. Bush was taken aback. It was probably the harshest thing Mr. Cheney ever said to him during their eight years in office together and was meant to attack Mr. Bush’s sense of loyalty to his own troops in a time of war. ‘The comment stung,’ Mr. Bush wrote in his memoir.”

-- Apropos of something: Bush agreed to sit for an interview in the Oval Office as part of Fitzgerald’s probe. The president fielded questions from Fitzgerald and several assistants for 70 minutes in June 2004. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said at the time that Bush was “pleased to do his part” to assist the investigation. “No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States, and he has said on more than one occasion that if anyone — inside or outside the government — has information that can help the investigators get to the bottom of this, they should provide that information to the officials in charge,” he said.