Before Judge Reggie Walton sentenced Scooter Libby earlier this month, he was flooded with letters from more than 100 friends and colleagues urging leniency for Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff. Such letters are common at the end of trials. High-profile defendants and anonymous miscreants alike supply testimonials in the hopes of persuading the judge that the verdict was inconsistent with a life of altruism and sunshine.
There were plenty of those letters in the Libby file delivered to Judge Walton. One came from Eric Fernandez, who as a teenager had worked for Libby on two occasions. Another came from Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One letter came from a former secretary of the Air Force and another from one of the stewards on Air Force Two. Neighbors, clergymen, staffers, bosses, law school classmates, partners at his old law firms, Bush administration officials, Clinton administration officials–all of them pleaded with Judge Walton to have a good thought for Libby.
Walton ignored the letters, or at least did not allow them to influence his decision to send Libby to prison for 30 months. Many readers of this magazine by now know the facts of the case, but it’s worth a review.
In the early summer of 2003, as the victory over Saddam Hussein failed to turn up weapons of mass destruction, Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s number two at the State Department, gossiped to both Bob Novak and Bob Woodward about Joe Wilson, a former diplomat and prominent critic of the Iraq war. Wilson had just made himself famous with the anti-Bush left by insinuating that Bush lied the country into the war, ignoring a mission to Niger by Wilson in which he supposedly debunked reports that Saddam Hussein had gone shopping there for uranium. Wilson claimed this was an errand he had run at the behest of Vice President Cheney.
It was more than a bit mysterious to reporters like Novak and Woodward–to any well-informed onlooker for that matter–why a loose cannon like Wilson would have been sent on such a sensitive mission by an administration he clearly loathed. Wilson’s sudden prominence as a critic of the administration was also embarrassing to the State Department, under whose aegis his trip to Niger had taken place (never mind Armitage’s own lack of enthusiasm for the war). Armitage explained to Novak and Woodward that Wilson’s trip had in fact been set up at a low level by Wilson’s wife–Valerie Plame–who worked at the CIA.
Dropped into Novak’s column, this anecdote gave rise to the myth of a White House conspiracy to “get” Wilson by destroying his wife’s career. The CIA referred the leak to the Justice Department for criminal investigation (under certain conditions, the exposure of undercover CIA operatives is illegal). When the investigation seemed stalled, news of the referral was leaked, probably by the CIA, leading Justice to appoint a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. By then FBI investigators–and soon Fitzgerald himself–knew that Armitage, not Libby, was the source of the original leak.
Two years later, after thousands of hours of sworn testimony to FBI agents and grand juries by dozens of journalists and Bush administration officials; after the jailing of a New York Times reporter for contempt and evidence that a number of media figures had hedged the truth or lied through their teeth when it came to their own reporting on Wilson and Plame, Fitzgerald charged no one with wrongdoing except Libby, who was convicted of perjury and impeding the investigation. Although Fitzgerald never charged Libby or anyone else with exposing the identity of a covert CIA operative, he urged the judge to punish Libby as if he had committed such a crime. And so the judge has done.
When he was chief of staff in Gerald Ford’s White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking of himself, said: “I really do think that a staff man should be anonymous.” Until Joseph Wilson fingered Libby as the official who outed his wife, Libby was that anonymous staff man. (Wilson’s claim, like so many others that passed his lips, was later shown to be false.)
Reasonable people disagree about whether Libby lied to investigators, as the jury found, or was the victim of a faulty memory and an overzealous prosecutor, as his defenders maintain. And not everyone who worked with Libby appreciated his sometimes-clipped manner and the tight control he exercised over access to his boss. But if the letters to Walton are any indication, Libby’s contributions to post-9/11 national security were significant and deserve to be better known.
One letter came from W. Seth Carus, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction at the National Defense University. Carus had worked with Libby on WMD and homeland security issues and writes that his former colleague was a chief architect of the protective measures now in place on bioterrorism.
This view is echoed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. He wrote:
Robert Blackwill, a former dean at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and former deputy national security adviser for strategic planning under Bush, credits Libby with keeping a bad situation in Iraq from getting worse and suggests a relationship between Libby’s exit and the further difficulties there:
Such policy-focused letters were the exceptions. Others struck a more personal note, including two that highlighted Libby’s response to personal tragedies among his staff.
“Mr. Libby was with me on Air Force 2 when I found out that my father had suddenly passed away,” wrote Paul Flynn, a military aide to Cheney. “As you can imagine, this was a very difficult moment for me. One thing that I will remember about the first few hours after I had received the news and began sorting out what to do next, is Mr. Libby’s genuine concern and support for me and my family. He personally informed the Vice President of the situation and offered his assistance in helping me make arrangements to return home. In addition, he made time to speak with me after my return to duty to express his sympathy.”
Jonathan W. Burks, a former domestic policy aide to Cheney, described a similar experience:
Fritz Ermath, former chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council (NIC), described advice he once got from Scooter Libby, the attorney.
David Gries, former vice chairman of the NIC, offered a similar story:
Gries also wrote of Libby’s pro bono representation of former government officials. Libby once represented an individual who was being considered for secretary of the Army. Opponents alleged that the individual, a distinguished Vietnam veteran, had been engaged in shady business dealings in Vietnam. Libby defended him without sending him a bill. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz highlighted the same case. “I also remember how Mr. Libby offered his services pro bono or at reduced cost–after he had returned to private law practice–to help former colleagues and friends with legal issues. In one case, he helped a public official defend himself successfully against libelous accusations, something that it is extremely difficult to do for anyone in public office,” Wolfowitz wrote.
“The official in question was Richard Armitage. . . . ”
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
