The Libby legacy

Daniel Henninger:

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Scooter Libby is the most notable casualty of the domestic war that ran alongside the global war on terror.

In my many years of writing about Washington's politics, I thought that the Plame affair, its long, mad hunt for the leaker, and then the Libby trial, was one of the most fantastic, preposterous events I've ever watched.

A Washington press corps for whom leaks have become the oxygen of life spent three years writing about who leaked Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak. Of all the serious and genuinely damaging leaks during the Bush presidency, this was the only one the press chased. Why? This one was different. This leaker was thought to be a top Bush aide, perhaps even the vice president. Once named, this aide could be demolished by a prosecution.

That proved true. Scooter Libby was demolished.

Nominally the legal case was about the wheels of a prosecution in motion. Indeed by its end the details of the case against Mr. Libby had burned down to a travesty. But make no mistake. The effort that went into keeping the Plame affair alive was about discrediting the war effort in Iraq and the Bush antiterror program.

To the extent the Libby prosecution distracted the White House staff, consumed its working hours, eroded personal savings on lawyers, and inevitably pitted the president's aides against each other, the strategy worked. The domestic opposition didn't deter George Bush. But like any tireless pack, it hurt him and it hurt his goals.

I often wonder what the Bush presidency would have been like without 9/11. I wonder as well about the unhinged antipathy that grew against this president. For his own part, Mr. Bush clearly decided that his obligation was to exercise the powers of the presidency with as much will and wisdom as he could muster after that murderous attack.

The president's pardon authority is embedded with clarity in our spare Constitution. Alexander Hamilton argued it should reside with "a single man of prudence and good sense."

I think there is a good legal argument for the Libby pardon, but others have done that well, making a credible case that he in fact is innocent. But there is another dimension to this that deserves consideration.

Washington is on thin ice. The American people could not be more disgusted than they are with the tenor and conduct of politics in Washington. The long Libby case was more muck. When the vice president's chief of staff was convicted, financially ruined and professionally destroyed on the basis of a conversation, my first thought was, this is going to make it hard to attract the best people to serve in Washington.

Why wouldn't the spouse of anyone offered a similar job argue that if the system can let a Scooter Libby wash over the falls for this, the price is just too high. "You aren't going to put our family's future at this much risk. We won't serve. We can't."

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I think that Bush clearly has nothing to lose by pardoning Libby, and the country has much to gain. I still see Plame and her husband as part of an attempt by people within the CIA to undermine the war effort by distorting facts in the lead up to the war against Iraq. Their continued distortions led to the Libby prosecution in a case that never should have been brought in the exercise of proper prosecutorial descretion.

It is not clear to me that Libby has asked for a pardon, which complicates the issue. I think the President should at a minimum also commute the sentence of the two border agents whose prosecution was also an abuse of presecutorial discrestion.