Pardons And Whistle-Blowers

NB: I have buried the lede on this post!

Interesting. Bush's use of the Presidential Pardon has been so limited to date that is is described as pretty close to "stingy".

In eight years in office, President Clinton pardoned and commuted the sentences of 456 people. In his four-year term, the first President Bush granted 77. In four years in the White House, Jimmy Carter granted clemency to 566 people...

"He's being careful to the point of trivializing his pardon power," says Margaret Colgate Love, the federal pardons attorney from 1990 to 1997. "If he did absolutely nothing, he would be criticized as being stingy." The pardons he has granted for old, innocuous cases, she says, are "the least he can do. They say nothing."

Other legal analysts say Bush has good reason to be skittish. On his final day in office, Clinton granted 140 pardons, including several to political allies and their associates. Bush's father was criticized for pardoning six defendants in the Iran-contra scandal in 1992, ending an investigation into the sale of arms to Iran to raise money for Nicaraguan contras...

After Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in 1974, there was an effort to amend the Constitution to allow a pardon to be overturned within 180 days if two-thirds of the House of Representatives and Senate voted to negate it. In 1990, a House resolution proposed that pardons could be issued only after individuals were convicted. Neither proposal got much support.

Legal analysts say Ronald Reagan's "war on crime" led to a drop in the number of presidential pardons. In eight years, Reagan granted clemency to 406 people.

This article makes it sound like Bush is "saving up" his pardons for a rainy day, which is truly a bizarre concept. What is he trying to do - hide from the criticisms of history professors in the 24th Century?

Of course, he is probably going to need more than a few of them before the game is up. For example, Rumsfeld has admitted that he "ghosted" a detainee - yet another case where Bush officials not only blatantly but PROUDLY break the law. But Bush cannot pardon himself for sanctioning torture, breaking international laws to which the USA was signed up, and illegally wire-tapping his own citizens without court approval.

And here's a "hot tip" (as we say in Australia). True to form, Bush & Co. are agressively going after whoever leaked the details of the wire-tapping scandal: the Justice Department has already begun to investigate the leak. A day after that story broke, the NYT is reporting that a top Justice Department official resigned over the matter:

Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program...

Faced with Comey's reluctance, Card and Gonzales rushed to get a signature from Ashcroft, even though he was in hospital at the time:

Accounts differed as to exactly what was said at the hospital meeting between Mr. Ashcroft and the White House advisers. But some officials said that Mr. Ashcroft, like his deputy, appeared reluctant to give Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales his authorization to continue with aspects of the program in light of concerns among some senior government officials about whether the proper oversight was in place at the security agency and whether the president had the legal and constitutional authority to conduct such an operation.

It is unclear whether the White House ultimately persuaded Mr. Ashcroft to give his approval to the program after the meeting or moved ahead without it.

Ignore for the moment (if you can) the obvious potential for yet another White House crime here. Savvy media watchers will see clear potential for linkage here.

So was Comey the one who leaked the wire-tapping story to the NYT? Stay tuned...

Note that the same paper has the latest scoop. And the events described above occured in March 2004 - the NYT says it sat on the wire-tapping story for a year... Hmmmn...?

And by the way, I am not interested in "outing" Comey, just searching for the truth as ever. But if he did leak the info, I suggest he takes a leaf from the Wilson Playbook: the best form of defence is attack!!!

And about that Justice Department investigation, I can't help wondering what the parameters are. We've already discussed the potential for the PlameGate investigation to unravel the whole Bush presidency. Will this new investigation focus on whether Bush's actions were illegal (after all, there can be little offence in leaking details of a crime, can there)? Will it look at why the NYT held the story back for a year? Cue the Scotty McLellan theme music:

A Justice Department official, asked whether the investigation would examine the newspaper's publication of the information in addition to any government employees who might have leaked it, said he could not comment on any aspect of the investigation.

I love the fact that Pat Fitzgerald is playing his cards so close to his chest (in a world of media whores, it is so romantically old-fashioned that it just might work) but I fear there may be a battle brewing within the ranks of the Justice Department itself.

Remember, these guys are also examining "whether classified information was illegally disclosed to The Washington Post about a network of secret CIA prisons". From my perspective, that's three investigations all headed in the same direction, unless those heading the investigations have their own political agendas, in wich case they could all be on a collision course.

Remember too (talking of media whores) that Alberto "Dubya IS the Law" Gonzales is the head of the Justice Dept. Of course, he should recuse himself from all three investigations. But the key here seems to be the need to appoint a "special prosecutor" from outside the Justice Department, as happened (I believe) with Patrick Fitzgerald. It would be kinda funny ironic if an investigation that Bush & Co demanded ended up bringing them to the stockades...

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the Plame investigation was about ``political gamesmanship.'' But, she said, the NSA leak probe is frightening.

``In this case, there is no question that the public needed to know what the New York Times reported,'' she said. ``It's much more of a classic whistleblower situation. The public needs to know when the government is engaged in things that may well be unconstitutional.''

Amen.