Did Libby Make a Deal?

John Podhoretz, writing in his New York Post opinion column, predicts with assurance: "In his last days as president, George W. Bush will pardon Scooter Libby -- that is, if the convictions secured yesterday don't get overturned on appeal.

"For political reasons, Bush can't pardon Libby earlier than that. His responsibilities as head of the Republican Party, heading into an election year, would preclude such action.

"But Bush won't leave office without issuing that pardon.

"Why? Because if Bush fails to pardon Libby, he will implicitly be accepting the contention that Scooter Libby was part of a White House conspiracy at the highest levels to destroy the career of a CIA agent whose husband had proved Bush & Co. had lied us into the Iraq War."

It seems to me a pardon would actually make the opposite statement, but what do I know?

Robert D. Novak, not surprisingly, calls for a pardon in his syndicated column.

Ken Dilanian writes for USA Today that calls for a pardon "have come from longtime critics of the Libby prosecution, including pundit William Kristol, former federal prosecutor Victoria Toensing and George Mason University Law professor Ronald Rotunda."

David G. Savage writes in the Los Angeles Times: "The perjury conviction of former senior White House advisor I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby was condemned as a 'travesty' and a 'politicized prosecution' by much of the conservative media Wednesday. . . .

"Amid this fervor, some veterans of an earlier political drama -- President Clinton's impeachment in the late 1990s -- were amused by their political opponents' new views of the significance of perjury and obstruction of justice.

"'They thought it was OK for prosecutors to pursue the president for lying about sex, and now they think it's unfair to prosecute someone in the White House for lying to a grand jury about outing a CIA agent,' Lanny J. Davis, Clinton's special counsel during that time, said Wednesday. 'This is not just hypocritical. It is comical.'

"If nothing else, the reaction to the Libby verdict shows again that it's hard to separate law and politics in Washington's dramas."

Lessons Learned

Amy Goldstein writes in The Washington Post about the "many tantalizing insights the trial offered into a White House culture in which even the top aides who surrounded the president were not entirely open with one another.