Presidential Pardons and Commutations, with Special Attention to "Scooter" Libby's Commuted Sentence

President Bush has commuted Scooter Libby's sentence, eliminating the prison time, but not touching the fine or probation. I approve of this. But I have some nagging questions about the beginnings of this epic saga.
1. Do covert agents regularly drive to work at CIA Headquarters?
2. Was Valerie Wilson a covert agent?
3. Aren't covert agents treated as if they don't exist?
4. If the answers to (2) and (3) are yes, then why was Valerie Wilson "in the loop" concerning her husband's trip to Niger? It seems at the least that they asked her to ask him if he wanted to make the trip.
5. If Joe Wilson was debriefed after returning, why is there no written record of this? There seems to be some confusion as to what his conclusions actually were.

As I said in an earlier post , I consider Novak and Rove to be the real villains in all this, but I also think that the CIA may have jeopardized Valerie Wilson's covert status by involving her at all. Very sloppy if you ask me. George Smiley definitely wouldn't approve.

President Bill Clinton pardoned "fugitive financier" Marc Rich at the end of his second presidential term in 2001. Rich's ex-wife was a Clinton fundraiser, and his one of his lawyers was -get ready for this- Scooter Libby! Although Libby was no longer retained by Rich when Clinton pardoned him, he testified before a House Committee in 2001 that he believed prosecutors of billionaire financier Marc Rich "misconstrued the facts and the law" when they went after Rich on tax evasion.

One thing that surprised me when Libby was indicted was the strong statement of support he got from Richard Clarke, the anti-terrorism guru and a critic of George W. Bush.

" I think there are two reactions.

One is you have to realize that this is a personal tragedy for Scooter and his family. Whatever else is going on. That is going on.

And Scooter Libby didn't come to Washington to do something wrong. He came here giving up what could have been a lucrative law career to help the nation.

Now something happened along the way, and I'm not going to be the judge of that. But, it is tragic, what's happening to him personally.

Whose ever is in power there {the White House], people are dragged through the mud.

And we just have to find a way of not doing this every time we have somebody in the White House, of trying to drag them down and drag their people down in a criminal process. There has to be a political way, a political process, based on argument and facts and debate not on criminal charges and mud slings."

Libby was a public servant, not an independent agent. He worked at the direction of Dick Cheney. He got caught in a political buzz saw and ended up committing perjury.

Now so did Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell, et al, for Richard Nixon, and they did jail time. But for sure there were underlying crimes in the Watergate cover-up. In Libby's case there were none, as it turns out. There were also underlying crimes in Iran-Contra, and George H. W. Bush pardoned Casper Weinberger et al at the end of his term, thereby stymieing the Special Prosecutor and helping to cover up his own possible involvement. (I believe that George W. aided and abetted this when he first got in office by resetting the clock as to how long things could be kept secret from the latter part of Reagan's second term.)

So was commuting Libby's sentence a cover up? If so, of what? Crimes we don't know about? Political chicanery in trying to discredit Joe Wilson, which we already know plenty about? A pardon says that the legal system made a mistake, and it should be thoroughly vetted. On the other hand, it seems to me that commuting a sentence is more an act of mercy. Now it's true that Bush's quality of mercy is quite strained, evidently applying only to friends and colleagues, and not for example to prisoners on Death Row in Texas. But does that mean that commuting Libby's sentence was wrong? No. He did the right thing. It was perfectly consistent with his political persona, and he is -like it or not - our two term president.