The Scooter Libby Pardon
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

President Trump hadn’t even issued his pardon of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby when the Democratic Party foghorns started suggesting he was doing it for reasons they see as nefarious. “This is the President’s way of sending a message to those implicated in the Russia investigation: You have my back and I‘ll have yours,” the Washington Post quoted Congressman Adam Schiff tweeting. To Mr. Schiff we commend 74 Federalist by Alexander Hamilton.
For it turns out that the Founders wrestled with the problem of a president turning on the U.S. government itself (they worried about treason). Some argued that, as Hamilton put it, “the supposition of the connivance of the Chief Magistrate ought not to be entirely excluded.” In the end, though, they decided to give, even for treason, the pardon power to the president alone. Hamilton urged that the “prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed.”
In the case of Mr. Libby, our view is that President Trump did the right thing. It is shocking that the aide to Vice President Cheney was ever prosecuted, particularly because the American government — what used to be called in court the “People of the United States” — already knew who committed the leak the prosecutor was appointed to investigate. The injustice was so abject that one juror wept as the verdict was read, and two stated they hoped Mr. Libby would be pardoned.
It turns out, moreover, that Mr. Libby was wrongly convicted. This was pointed out in an important editorial this evening by the Wall Street Journal. Key to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s case against Mr. Libby was testimony of ex-New York Times reporter Judith Miller. “Ms. Miller says she testified truthfully at the time,” the Journal reports, “but she later concluded based on new information that she had been led into false testimony by Mr. Fitzgerald.”
In summation to the jury, notes the Journal, Mr. Fitzgerald had called Ms. Miller’s testimony “critical.” Ms. Miller, the Journal adds, “says that the prosecutor twice told her lawyer that he would drop all charges against Mr. Libby if he offered evidence against Mr. Cheney. Mr. Libby had no evidence to trade, and Mr. Fitzgerald then set out to ruin Mr. Libby for supposedly lying about a non-crime.” So, good for Mr. Trump.
Apart from all that, an added sweetness attaches to the Libby pardon. It turns out that the justice department official who appointed the special prosecutor who went after Scooter Libby was none other than President Trump’s current nattering nemesis of negativism, James Comey. He was the deputy attorney general who named a special prosecutor to find the leaker who’d blown the cover of the CIA’s Valerie Plame. And let the prosecutor go too far.
Now the idea is percolating that we do away with special prosecutors altogether. Rich Lowry, no Trump apologist, has a trenchant column in today’s New York Post. He writes that Robert Mueller’s probe has just taken “a Ken Starr turn with its lurch, via the Southern District of New York, into the Stormy Daniels affair.” It’s not Mr. Mueller’s character to which Mr. Lowry objects, as we read him, but the temptations that come with any special prosecutor’s special power.
Nor is Mr. Lowry suggesting that Mr. Mueller be fired (we, ourselves, have favored that). He’s suggesting that Mr. Mueller be the last special prosecutor. The “independent” counsel law itself ended after the Clinton impeachment, when Congress failed to renew the law under which Judge Starr had been appointed. At bottom, “special” counsels aren’t much different. Doing away with them would help ensure that there will be fewer injustices like that which befell Mr. Libby.
Which brings us back to the critics of President Trump’s motives. Where could he possibly have gotten the idea to signal to his vast camarilla that he’d have the back of those who stood with him? We don’t know. There was, though, a woman, Susan McDougal, who actually went to jail — and for a good stretch — for refusing to testify against a president who’d been her business partner and who was being investigated by an independent counsel. On the last day of his presidency, that president, Bill Clinton, gave her a full pardon.
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This editorial was updated to include points in the Wall Street Journal’s editorial, “Justice for Scooter Libby,” which was published this evening.