Pardon me is the government above the law

Author: ALEX GARLICK '08.5

The indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is exposing a flaw in the structure of our government that has been exploited by both Democratic and Republican administrations: the pardon. Scooter Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, is charged with leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative. If convicted, Libby faces up to 30 years for his actions; however, he's likely to serve less than 10 percent of that sentence because he has a presidential pardon in his future.

A possible motivation for Libby's action is that the outing of Plame was to spite her husband, Joe Wilson, an out spoken opponent of the administration. It appears as if Libby may have been carrying out orders coming from higher up on the administration's chain of command. This is where it gets interesting, since Libby is already very high up on the chain, leading one to wonder where such an order could have originated. The President's deputy chief of staff and close personal confidant, Karl Rove, has been highly investigated but has yet to be indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor pursuing the case. There is also speculation it could have come from the desk of Cheney himself, since Libby is his top advisor.

There's really only one man who could clear up this mystery: Libby himself. In a case like this, the prosecutor would usually be quick to offer up a shorter sentence to Libby in the hopes of nabbing the source above him. But with knowledge of an impending pardon in his back pocket, Libby has no reason to cooperate with Fitzgerald.

So how can the special prosecutor be expected to rightfully do his job? His offer would never be accepted and he'll never get to the bottom of this. The American people are being deprived ok knowledge of what the true motivation behind this malicious personal attack from the White House was.

By sealing his lips and protecting his higher-up source, Libby is protecting his own backside as well. I can almost guarantee you that if Libby is convicted he'll regain his freedom in January of 2009, when President Bush will pardon away Libby's wrongdoing on his way out of the White House.

This will not be the first time that a president has pardoned those who have sacrificed for him. President Clinton pardoned a key player in the Whitewater scandal, Susan McDougal, in the last hours of his administration. President George H. W. Bush pardoned Oliver North, infamously connected with the Iran Contra affairs that plagued the Reagan administration. The common theme that has developed is that the government, specifically the White House, considers itself to be above the law.

This creates a very dangerous situation. Especially when the White House is using classified information for personal political purposes. If Karl Rove or Dick Cheney was the one who instructed Scooter Libby to uncover this CIA agent to spite or silence her husband, then Libby should go to prison for 30 years. If it was in fact Libby acting on his own convictions than he should go to prison for 30 years. The fact remains that someone in the government abused his access, abused his position and needs to be punished for it, severely, and not with a two year slap on the wrist sentence.

The White House appears un-fazed and ready to move on. President Bush has yet to make public statements severely condemning Libby. Instead, as the The New York Times is reporting, Bush is merely instructing his staff to attend ethics seminars, a terribly insufficient measure considering this breach of national security. The message in his actions is that if you take a bullet for his administration, it will watch your back. So even though Libby's (and possibly Rove's) indictment will garner massive national attention and he will most likely be convicted, just two years later he will walk away a free man. Meanwhile Plame and numerous other CIA agents are living their lives at risk because they were betrayed by their own country, at its highest levels. They were betrayed strictly for political purposes, and betrayed because the government can act without fear of serious repercussions as it sees itself as being above the law of the land.

The author is a fellow of the Roosevelt Institution Center on Governmental Reform.