'Move On'? Not So Fast, Mr. President

Joe Conason writes for Salon: "The White House press corps should not accept [Bush's] puerile and facetious answer.

"For four years, every reporter who asked the president or his press secretaries any question about the Wilson matter has received essentially the same non-responsive response: The president and the White House staff could not talk about the matter so long as the special counsel was actively pursuing the case. That tired excuse no longer works.

"Now that the leak prosecution has ended with Bush's silencing of Libby -- the only potential stool pigeon who could implicate him and Vice President Cheney in the vicious and unpatriotic 'outing' of Valerie Plame Wilson -- he says instead that it is time to move on. Yet all of the lingering questions still require real answers."

A Frustrated Judge

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Richard B. Schmitt writes in the Los Angeles Times: "In an unusual expression of frustration, the judge who sentenced former White House aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby to 30 months in jail, only to see the sentence commuted by President Bush, said he was 'perplexed' by the act of clemency.

"In his first public comments on the matter, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton took issue with Bush's statement that the prison sentence ordered for Libby last month was 'excessive.' Walton defended the sentence, saying that he followed established legal precedents as well as a strict interpretation of federal sentencing guidelines that has been supported by Bush's own administration.

"'In light of these considerations . . . it is fair to say that the court is somewhat perplexed as to how its sentence could accurately be characterized as "excessive," ' Walton wrote."

Here's the ruling: "In commuting the defendant's thirty-month term of incarceration, the President stated that the sentence imposed by this Court was 'excessive' and that two years of supervised release and a $250,000 alone are a 'harsh punishment' for an individual convicted on multiple counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators. Although it is certainly the President's prerogative to justify the exercise of his constitutional commutation power in whatever manner he chooses (or even to decline to provide a reason for his actions altogether), the Court notes that the term of incarceration imposed in this case was determined after a careful consideration of each of the requite statutory factors, and was consistent with the bottom end of the applicable sentencing range as properly calculated under the United States Sentencing Guidelines."

Walton's comments came in the course of his ordering Libby to begin serving a term of supervised release.

Laurie Asseo writes for Bloomberg: "Walton said that with 'great reservation,' he concluded that Bush's commutation of Libby's prison sentence while preserving the supervised release didn't violate the Constitution.

"Bush had 'rewritten the statutory scheme' to make it 'applicable to a situation that Congress clearly did not intend,' the judge wrote.

"Walton also wrote that if Libby violates any of the required conditions of his release, which 'this court has no reason to believe will occur,' he could be ordered to spend the term in prison."

Bush at War

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jeff Zeleny write in the New York Times: "President Bush struck an aggressive new tone on Thursday in his clash with Congress over Iraq, telling lawmakers they had no business trying to manage the war, portraying the conflict as a showdown with Al Qaeda and warning that moving toward withdrawal now would risk 'mass killings on a horrific scale.'"