{"id":10125,"date":"2007-03-06T16:30:54","date_gmt":"2007-03-06T21:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10125.html"},"modified":"2007-03-06T16:30:54","modified_gmt":"2007-03-06T21:30:54","slug":"a-new-cancer-on-the-presidency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-new-cancer-on-the-presidency\/","title":{"rendered":"A new cancer on the presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Sullivan seems to have summarized the lesson of the day<\/a> quite nicely.<\/p>\n

Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president’s office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about – what it has always been about – is whether this administration deliberately misled the American people about WMD intelligence before the war. The risks Cheney took to attack Wilson, the insane over-reaction that otherwise very smart men in this administration engaged in to rebut a relatively trivial issue: all this strongly implies the fact they were terrified that the full details of their pre-war WMD knowledge would come out. <\/p>\n

Fitzgerald could smell this. He was right to pursue it, and to prove that a brilliant, intelligent, sane man like Libby would risk jail to protect his bosses. What was he really trying to hide? We now need a Congressional investigation to find out more, to subpoena Cheney and, if he won’t cooperate, consider impeaching him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

About a month ago, Kevin Drum noted<\/a> one of those points that everyone seems to understand implicitly, but few have bothered to articulate: Fitzgerald talked to a lot of White House and administration staffers as part of this investigation, and Libby was apparently the only one to lie. Richard Armitage originally leaked Plame’s name to Novak, and even he didn’t try to lie. Libby, however, lied repeatedly, under oath, to the FBI, Fitzgerald, and the grand jury. “What was different about the vice president’s office that out of the entire mountain of people Fitzgerald interviewed, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was the only one who felt he had to lie?” Kevin asked.<\/p>\n

The answer, I suspect, gets back to what Sullivan said: “Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president’s office.”<\/p>\n

It’s hardly a stretch to put two and two together here. Libby almost certainly lied because he knew what his colleagues didn’t: that Cheney told Libby about Plame.
\n
\nLibby had to push some bizarre story about learning about Plame from Tim Russert – almost certainly because he couldn’t acknowledge his original source. As Ezra noted<\/a>, Libby’s convictions — obstructing justice, providing a false statement, and two counts of perjury — are “protective crimes — they serve to protect others higher in the food chain.” And considering Libby’s role in the White House, that means Cheney.<\/p>\n

Kevin explained<\/a> the likely chain of events.<\/p>\n

For some reason, in May 2003 Cheney went ballistic over a couple of anonymous statements Joe Wilson made to Nick Kristof and Walter Pincus, statements that weren’t especially damaging to Cheney and could have been challenged pretty easily. It’s hard to say why … but the end result was that Cheney ferreted out Plame’s identity, passed it along to Libby, and told him to put a full-court press on Wilson. Libby thought it was worth lying about this because it threatened to provide a clue to just how involved Cheney had been in spinning the prewar intelligence on Iraqi nukes. That was the one thing serious enough to make them wildly overreact to a couple of otherwise toothless allegations.<\/p>\n

Libby deserves his convictions. The only unfair thing about the whole trial is that his boss, the guy who was behind the whole thing, wasn’t in the dock with him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And it’s not too late. Maybe Libby will wake up and realize there’s no point in taking the fall for his boss. Maybe Congress will explore this in high-profile hearings and expose the larger scandal.<\/p>\n

Either way, Cheney has solidified his legacy — as a cancer on Bush’s presidency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Sullivan seems to have summarized the lesson of the day quite nicely. Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president’s office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about – what it has always been about – is whether this administration deliberately misled the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}