On Thursday evening, news emerged that Donald Trump intended to pardon former Dick Cheney chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
The president has already signed off on the pardon, which is something he has been considering for several months, sources told ABC News.
Libby was convicted of lying under oath in 2007 to a grand jury investigating who had leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to conservative columnist Robert Novak. Libby and others in the Bush administration put Plame’s life at risk in a move calculated to get revenge on Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, whose crime was revealing that one of the big claims used to justify the war in Iraq was absolute bullshit.
In a sign of just how much the Republican Party even then supported lying and personal vendettas, many on the right called for George W. Bush to pardon Libby. The term “witch hunt” was widely used to describe prosecuting Libby for the measly act of releasing classified information and lying to a grand jury. But in the last days of his administration, Bush restricted himself to commuting Libby’s sentence, while letting his conviction stand.
Now Donald Trump is reaching back over a decade to pardon Libby. And despite claims that it’s been on Trump’s mind for months, there seems to be absolutely no doubt about why Libby and why now.
Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos have all pleaded guilty to making false statements and agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Alex Van der Zwaan, the one person sentenced so far in connection with the Trump–Russia investigation, is serving time for making false statements. Before Van der Zwaan’s sentencing, Mueller made it clear that he wanted jail time for the Dutch lawyer—making it clear that knowingly making a false statement to an investigator was a crime that carried consequences.
Donald Trump wants to make it clear that lying under oath is no big deal. Because Trump can, and will, pardon anyone.
There’s no doubt that Trump sees the investigation into the Plame incident and Libby’s conviction as a mini version of what is happening now.
The right’s narrative about Libby — that he was railroaded by an overreaching, politically driven special prosecutor — syncs with Trump’s view of his own predicament, as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s continues to dig into Trump’s world. “A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!” the president has tweeted about the Mueller investigation.
The fact that the right can simultaneously scream that prosecuting Libby for revealing information on an active CIA agent in an effort to discredit her husband, feeding her name to the press, then lying about that act to a grand jury is a “witch hunt,” but Hillary Clinton’s emails are a cardinal sin, shows how closely their idea of proper justice aligns with their ideas of “fake news.”
But there’s one additional factor that helps make pardoning Libby satisfying to Trump.
By the end of 2003, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the case.
That left the decision on how to proceed to the deputy attorney general — a man named James B. Comey.
The future-FBI director appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney from Chicago, as special counsel.
So Trump sees the pardoning of Libby as a signal to those currently under investigation that the pardon light is on, a nice slab of bloody meat to those on the right who have been howling for a decade that mere law-breaking shouldn’t get in the way of doing what they want, and as a big bonus Trump views this as a slap to James Comey. That’s win, win, win so far as Trump is concerned.