The only thing media types like better than self-congratulation is self-flagellation.
President Trump’s pardoning of former George W. Bush aide Scooter Libby offers them a chance to have both — the self-congratulation now, the flagellation a little later.
CNN’s Jake Tapper led the way here. In a Friday tweet, Tapper counterposed Libby’s pardon with the president’s treatment of former FBI Director James Comey.
“Calling @Comey a ‘proven LEAKER & LIAR’ while you’re about to pardon Scooter Libby, who leaked the identity of a covert CIA employee and was convicted for lying about it to the FBI — well, that’s quite a thing,” Tapper said. Others have followed, along similar lines.
Tapper may have focused on a supposed double-standard but he was only half-right about Libby and all wrong in his tone. It’s simply flabbergasting to see media figures raise questions about the efficacy of pardoning someone for the “crime” of leaking. It’s like watching Oedipus insist on finding the culprit behind Thebes’ woes.
A whole generation has come of age since I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was last in the news, and even then his case read like drunken dispatches from late Byzantium. Briefly, here are the facts:
- In 2003, as he pushed his country into another ground war against Iraq, George W. Bush claimed that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire “significant quantities of uranium” from Niger.
- In July, 2003, the New York Times published a column by former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, who had traveled to Niger the previous year, casting doubt about Bush’s claim.
- A week after Wilson’s column was published, veteran newsman Robert Novak ran a column of his own in which he said that Wilson had been put up for the Niger mission at the suggestion of his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA officer. (Many in the CIA and State Department were hostile to Bush’s Iraq policy and leaked steadily against it.)
- Immediately, antiwar voices cried foul, blaming the Bush administration for outing a secret agent as payback for her (and her husband’s) dovishness.
- A special prosecutor was commissioned and reporters and White House aides soon found themselves having to answer questions in front of a grand jury.
- New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent a summer behind bars for contempt for refusing to acknowledge any of the sources for her reporting following up on what was already being called “the Plame affair.”
- Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney and one of Miller’s sources, would be convicted of obstruction, perjury and making false statements to investigators. He was accused not of being the actual leaker, but of lying about the date he first learned of Plame’s career as a spook.
- The original leaker of Plame’s identity, it would later emerge, was Richard Armitage, deputy Secretary of State — a man who was (nominally) on Plame’s side on the Iraq War debate. (Novak himself was also skeptical about Bush’s adventurism.)
Those who have followed this far are to be saluted for their endurance. But we’re only sketching the outlines of absurdity here.
The law under which the special prosecutor in the Plame Affair obtained his brief was the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, yet another example of the exorbitant care and feeding our security state requires. The act was passed by right-wing hawks, furious that hippies and other undesirables might raise questions about the CIA’s breathtakingly long history of incompetence and criminality. So it was (and is) a thing to behold, here in Washington, as anti-war journalists (most, but not all, on the political left) cheer on the fuzz for avenging the honor of the CIA’s own Joan of Arc.
No one can expect Trump to have considered any of this. The man is as close to mere protoplasm as our republic can produce — touch him with current and watch him twitch. Accusing him of double standards is empty; the man has no standards at all.
The national media doesn’t have that excuse. They know, or ought to know, just how sticky things can get when the state finds journalism inconvenient. Those who sneer at the pardon of Scooter Libby ought to be careful what they wish for. When the policeman’s club lands on a worker’s head, a famous American leftist once had it, he hears the echo of the vote he cast in the last election.
Bill Myers lives and works in Washington. Email him at [email protected]. He tweets from @billcaphill.
