With Liberty and Justice for Some by Glenn Greenwald Read Free Book Online

an improbable set of circumstances. First, Libby had made the mistake of crossing the CIA, which loathes any outing of covert agents. Because it was the CIA that had asked the Department of Justice to investigate the leak, the request had to be taken seriously. Thus, it was not only the perpetrators of the crime in this case who wielded elite status but also one of their prime victims. The CIA insisted that the leak of Plame’s identity violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which criminalizes the disclosure by anyone of the identity of a covert CIA operative.
    Second, because the primary culprits were all top Bush aides and perhaps even Bush himself, the president’s political appointees at the DOJ had to recuse themselves from the investigation; the possible conflict of interest they faced—having to investigate their own bosses—was too severe even for our highly permissive political culture. Thus the DOJ was forced to assign full autonomy to a prosecutor who would remain independent of the DOJ hierarchy and could therefore conduct the investigation free from the control of the president’s loyal staff. And third, the independent prosecutor chosen by DOJ officials to lead the investigation, Patrick Fitzgerald, happened to possess an unusual degree of tenacity and aggressiveness when it came to pursuing prominent targets. These circumstances combined to produce the rarest of all Washington events: the prosecution of a truly powerful individual for serious crimes committed while in office.
    In his October 28, 2005, announcement of the grand jury’s indictment, Fitzgerald underscored the significance of the event: “I think what we see here today, when a vice president’s chief of staff is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, it does show the world that this is a country that takes its law seriously; that all citizens are bound by the law.”
    The progress of Libby’s trial bore out the lofty ideals expressed by Fitzgerald. On June 5, 2007, the Bush 43–appointed federal judge presiding over the trial sentenced Libby to thirty months in prison. As the Associated Press reported, “In the end, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said Libby’s lies in the Valerie Plame affair outweighed his public service.” For a moment, it looked as though a hole had been blasted in the shield of immunity enjoyed by America’s elites. On the day Libby was sentenced, I wrote—rather optimistically, probably naively—in my Salon column:
    This event sends a potent and unmistakable message, one that is absolutely reverberating in the West Wing: If Libby can be convicted of multiple felonies, then any Bush official who has committed crimes can be as well…. Having the nation watch this powerful Bush official be declared a criminal—despite having been defended by the best legal team money can buy—resoundingly reaffirms the principle that our highest political officials can and must be held accountable when they break the law.
     
    The affirmation of that principle did not last very long. Less than a month later, on July 2, 2007, President Bush announced his decision to commute the sentence completely down to zero—despite Libby’s conviction on multiple felony counts, Libby would serve no jail time whatsoever. And just as his father’s pardon of Iran-Contra criminals ended an investigation that threatened to expose his own wrongdoing, so, too, did Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence provide presidential protection to an individual who could well have incriminated the president. Once again, with a wave of the presidential hand, the rule of law was abolished and the rule of men restored.
    Remarkably, the same right-wingers who had created the framework of merciless punishment for ordinary Americans rushed to celebrate Libby’s being spared from prison. This attitude was particularly striking given the lack of any partisan angle to the prosecution. The Plame investigation, after all, had been urged