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

Their Own might end up in prison. In a piece titled “Thoughts on Sentencing,” Klein actually prefaced his defense of Libby by insisting that it was of the utmost importance for Paris Hilton to receive jail time for driving with a suspended license because “it is exemplary: It sends the message…that even rich twits can’t avoid the law.” That same reasoning, however, apparently did not apply to Dick Cheney’s top adviser.
    I have a different feeling about Libby. His “perjury”—not telling the truth about which reporters he talked to—would never be considered significant enough to reach trial, much less sentencing, much less time in the stir if he weren’t Dick Cheney’s hatchet man…. Jail time? Do we really want to spend our tax dollars keeping Scooter Libby behind bars? I don’t think so. This “perjury” case only exists because of his celebrity.
     
    There are so many false and misleading assertions crammed into these few sentences that it is difficult to know where to begin. It is worth the effort to unpack them, though, because Klein’s defense of Libby reveals just how our media class reasons when it comes to the political figures whom they claim to hold accountable.
    Note, for instance, the snide use of quotation marks for “perjury”—as though Libby’s conviction constitutes that crime only in the most technical and meaningless sense, if at all. In fact, Libby’s lies to the FBI and the grand jury obscured the actual leakers’ identities and thereby significantly obstructed the government’s efforts to determine what happened. As Fitzgerald had put it when he announced Libby’s indictment: “What we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.” The University of Arizona professor Jonah Gelbach elaborated (emphasis in original).
    Libby’s lies struck at the heart of Fitzgerald’s—indeed, the prior DOJ investigation’s—ability to tell whether Libby had violated [the Intelligence Identities Protection Act]…. It’s not just the usual principle that obstruction and perjury can’t be tolerated—it’s that these instances prevented Fitzgerald from being able to decide whether any underlying crime (violation of the IIPA) had been committed.
     
    Contrary to Klein’s breezy efforts to trivialize them, Libby’s crimes were serious not only in the abstract but for the substantial impediments they deliberately put in the way of the government’s efforts to determine whether underlying crimes had occurred.
    It is also worth noting that Klein deliberately made no mention of the several felony counts of obstruction of justice and false statements for which Libby was convicted; his only crime, Klein implied, was “mere” perjury. More dishonest still was Klein’s manner of insinuating that Libby’s conviction and sentencing were politically motivated (that none of this would have happened “if he weren’t Dick Cheney’s hatchet man”) while inexcusably concealing from his readers that Libby’s prosecutor and the judge who sentenced him were both Republicans and appointees of George W. Bush’s administration.
    But the most glaring falsehood in Klein’s Libby defense is also the most significant for our purposes: namely, his claim that “perjury” is something for which people are not convicted and imprisoned unless they are “celebrities,” and that Libby was being persecuted because of his elevated position. In fact, the opposite is true: many far less famous or powerful Americans have been sent to prison or otherwise punished for the crimes of obstruction of justice and perjury. Here are just a few illustrative examples.
     
“The United States Attorney in Manhattan, Rudolph W. Giuliani, declared yesterday that the one-year prison sentence that a Queens judge received for perjury was ‘somewhat shocking.’ ‘A sentence of one year seemed to me to