By Staff
No sooner was former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby convicted last March of lying and obstructing an investigation into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity in 2003 than came conservative cries to pardon him.
Last week President Bush commuted Libby's too-harsh 30-month prison term. He could have gotten 25 years in prison.
Even Paris Hilton spent 23 days behind bars. Libby just wrote a $250,000 check and faces two years probation. He might also lose his license to practice law.
It's a joke for a high government official who betrayed the public trust and endangered a CIA agent's life by taking part in her outing.
Libby is a sympathetic figure to those who believe he was victimized by a politicized prosecution and made a fall guy for Vice President Dick Cheney and White House political adviser Karl Rove.
It was said a number of times, "'What are we doing with this guy here? Where's Rove?' " juror Denis Collins commented.
Perjury convictions average 17 months behind bars, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
But that doesn't mean Libby shouldn't spend even 17 minutes incarcerated just because Cheney's former chief of staff is also a presidential pal.
Consider the witch hunt which brought Libby down.
He was prosecuted by a Republican appointee, Patrick Fitzgerald, found guilty of one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury to the grand jury and one count of lying to the FBI by a jury which didn't yet know it was wasting its time before a presiding judge also appointed by the GOP.
Bush hasn't even ruled out eventually pardoning Libby in contrast to the tough law-and-order image the president cultivates otherwise.
Libby is the highest-ranking White House official convicted in a government scandal since the Iran-Contra arms and money deal two decades ago during the Reagan administration. The president's dad in 1992 pardoned those officials for peddling arms to Iran and diverting proceeds to Nicaraguan rebels.
Libby's perjury trial illuminated Cheney's eagerness to discredit war critic and former ambassador Joseph Wilson – Plame's husband – and Bush administration crisis management tactics. The actual leaker, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, wasn't charged.
"We cannot tolerate perjury," Fitzgerald said. "Truth is what drives our judicial system. If people don't tell the truth, the system cannot work."
The Libertarian Party says Bush's commutation raises the question of whether his standard for Libby ought not be applied to all Americans sentenced for non-violent crimes given our bulging prison population.
The average sentence for non-violent offenders is more than 50 months in prison.
It is estimated by the U.S. Department of Justice that one out of 15 people will spend time in jail at some point in life.
Treating everyone as special instead of just Libby in the nation with the world's highest prison population would free up a lot of limited resources to fight "real crime" and insure that dangerous violent offenders are not prematurely released.