Now, special
counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has charged former Bush administration
adviser Lewis "Scooter" Libby with perjury -- the "willful
giving of false, misleading or incomplete testimony under oath."
Hamlet struggled
with "to be or not to be." Clinton's decayed Hamlet
jived and jinked over the meaning of "is," as if he
had suddenly joined Alice in the word games of Wonderland.
We don't
know if Libby will invoke Hamlet or Alice, or carve out new literary
and legal territory. According to press reports, Libby will plead,
"I forget" -- but in the Great Name Valerie Plame Game,
the Washington press corps has earned no trust.
Clinton
staffers pulled the memory-loss trick time and again in congressional
testimony. In Libby's case, pleading brain fog may work and may
possibly be true. He'll have his chance to convince a jury. Heaven
knows he's a busy fellow. Perhaps his jam-packed Day-Timer will
be introduced as evidence.
There is
no doubt that former Ambassador Joe Wilson, whose trip to Niger
before the Iraq war led to this case, is a truth-challenged blowhard.
In the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, Plame's
husband comes off as a decidedly minor character who misled and,
at the minimum, exaggerated.
The committee
grilled Wilson about his media-touted claim to know key Nigerian
uranium documents were forged: "Staff asked how the former
ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were
wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA
reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the
reports." The former ambassador said that he may have "misspoken"
to the reporter." Historical bottom line: Wilson's claim
to have "debunked" Saddam Hussein's quest for African
uranium is specious.
Wilson's
media blitz did more to expose his wife's CIA service than Libby's
inside gossip, which gives the Plame Game a soap-opera twist.
But mud-wrestling
with Wilson is not the charge against Libby, nor is violation
of the Intelligence Identities Act. The big charge against Libby
is false testimony during the investigation.
If Libby
committed perjury, he did so out of arrogance. The most likely
scenario is both this simple and desperately sad: Libby thought
he could get away with it.
But then,
so did Clinton. Clinton calculated he had presidential power,
his media war room, his own bully pulpit. Libby had harnessed
the power of Washington's shadow forces: wheeling and dealing
with the K Street clan, handling political hatchets, leaking to
reporters and kowtowing to the mighty -- or what those of us in
flyover country consider the usual dirty day's work of a sharp
Beltway clerk.
Clinton's
disrespect for the law damaged the institution of the presidency.
Libby remains innocent until proven guilty, but the institutional
damage is obvious.
Clinton
and Libby have another damaging connection: mega-felon Marc Rich.
Clinton pardoned Rich hours before he left office -- accusations
of a payoff linger. Libby represented Rich on and off for 15 years.
Rich is a shady character who also knows how to work Washington's
shadows.
Fortunately,
for the health of America's governmental institutions, the Bush
White House hasn't pulled a Clinton and trashed the prosecutor.
By and large, the Bush administration has respected the judicial
process.
A Clintonesque
trash-the-prosecutor tactic probably wouldn't work, anyway, given
the press's liberal bias. Clinton could rely on friends in the
national press to amplify his tawdry demonization of Ken Starr.
Bush administration attacks on Fitzgerald would backfire.
There is
another upside. Covert intelligence work is difficult. Agents
are vulnerable. Fitzgerald's hard-nosed investigation does indeed
serve a national security role. In an era when human spies are
America's first line of defense, Fitzgerald argues, "The
notion that someone's identity could be compromised lightly, to
me, compromises the ability to recruit."
Bully for
the prosecutor. He's right.
