By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer
Sun March 11, 2007
WASHINGTON - Richard Nixon. Mark Felt. Caspar Weinberger.
Marc Rich. Is President Bush willing to risk — on behalf
of ex-White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby the
kind of political grief that pardons for those four men brought
the presidents who granted them?
Nixon resigned the presidency over the Watergate scandal.
Felt was the FBI man convicted of ordering illegal break-ins.
Weinberger was the defense secretary charged in the Iran-Contra
scandal. Rich was a fugitive financier.
All received presidential pardons processed outside normal
channels.
As in those cases, Bush would have to bypass the regular clemency
process to pardon Libby for the four felonies he was convicted
of on Tuesday.
Such pardons historically have gotten presidents into political
trouble.
A number of conservative politicians, bloggers and commentators,
including National Review and Wall Street Journal editorial
writers, want Libby pardoned, preferably now. Top Democrats
have demanded that Bush pledge not to pardon Vice President
Dick Cheney's former chief of staff.
William Jeffress, one of Libby's lawyers, said, "I believed
a pardon for Scooter was appropriate last summer" when
it came out that a State Department official, not Libby, was
the initial source for a newspaper column disclosing the classified
CIA job of Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson.
Bush's spokesman Tony Snow has tried to dampen speculation.
Snow said Bush is "careful" about pardons and takes
the process very seriously. "He wants to make sure that
anybody who receives one that it's warranted," Snow said.
The Constitution grants the president absolute power to grant
pardons, without approval by Congress or second-guessing by
the courts.
The only check on abuse is the risk of "the damnation
of his fame to all future ages," as James Iredell, one
of the original Supreme Court justices, once put it. Some have
run that risk.
-President Ford pardoned Nixon for Watergate before Nixon
had even been charged. The resulting rage is thought by many
political observers to have cost Ford his bid to be elected
president in 1976.
-President Reagan pardoned Felt and another FBI executive
in 1981 while they were appealing convictions for ordering
secret and illegal searches of the homes of relatives and friends
of violent opponents of the Vietnam War. The New York Times
called Reagan's clemency "a gratuitous revision of the
record." Prosecutor John W. Nields Jr., who was not consulted,
complained Reagan surely did not know what the trial brought
out about Felt — who years later was unmasked as the
mysterious "Deep Throat" source that helped expose
Watergate.
-On Christmas eve in 1992, just before he left office, the
first President Bush pardoned Weinberger and a CIA official
as they awaited trial on Iran-Contra charges, as well as four
other administration officials who had pleaded or been found
guilty in the scandal. Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh complained "the
Iran-Contra cover-up ... has now been completed," thus
blocking him from fully examining Bush's own role.
-On his last day in office in 2001, President Clinton pardoned
140 people. One was Rich, who had lived abroad for 17 years
to avoid trial on charges of evading $48 million in taxes.
Congress held hearings on the Rich pardon. A federal investigation
looked into whether the pardon was a reward for contributions
by Rich's ex-wife to Clinton's presidential library and his
wife's Senate campaign; no charges were brought.
None of these pardons went through the vetting process set
up at the Justice Department by President McKinley in 1898.
Department rules require that pardon-seekers wait five years
after conviction or release from prison, whichever is later,
before applying. Bush has less than two years left in office,
but presidents are not bound by department regulations.
The waiting period is designed to allow petitioners "to
demonstrate they can live as productive, law-abiding citizens," said
Margaret C. Love, the department's pardon attorney during 1990-1997,
under the elder Bush and Clinton's first term.
On occasion, the waiting period has been waived by the pardon
attorney or at the president's request, Love said. One example
was a teacher involved in steroid distribution who the prosecutor
said helped the government case and whose school district needed
a pardon to continue employing him.
The pardon attorney's career staff verifies claims of rehabilitation
and checks with the prosecutor, judge and victim. Complete
and consistent evaluations help produce department recommendations
that may shield a president from criticism.
But since Attorney General Griffin Bell delegated the supervision
to subordinates in 1977, Love said, the process has been "dominated
by federal prosecutors, who tended to regard pardon as an interference
with their law enforcement responsibilities."
Career prosecutors take a grave view of crimes against the
system of justice, like Libby's perjury and obstruction of
justice convictions. Although appointed by Bush as a U.S. attorney,
Patrick Fitzgerald is a career prosecutor and voiced that viewpoint
after winning the Libby convictions.
"Truth is what drives our judicial system. If people
don't tell the truth, the system cannot work. Having a high-level
official lie under oath is just something that can never be
accepted."
Many advocates of a pardon for Libby say he should never have
been charged at all. He maintains his innocence while defense
lawyers work on an appeal.
But a Justice Department manual says, "A petitioner should
be genuinely desirous of forgiveness rather than vindication.
... A petitioner's attempt to minimize or rationalize culpability
does not advance the case for pardon."
Finally, Bush just does not grant many pardons. In his first
year as Texas governor, he was burned. A county constable he
pardoned for a marijuana conviction was caught months later
stealing cocaine.
"I said, `Whoa!' because it was a pretty rough story," Bush
told a reporter. He went on to set a 50-year record low for
pardons in Texas, granting only 19, including six convicts
who proved their innocence.
As president, he's granted just 113 in just over six years — the
stingiest record among the 11 presidents since the end of World
War II.
___
On the Net:
Justice Department pardon
site
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