Press Briefing by Tony Snow

Press Briefing by Tony Snow:

Reading the Presidential press briefings are always enlightening to see how the various Bush spokespeople can continually contradict themselves and still maintain that they are speaking forthrightly and honestly. Below, I'm reprinting just one aspect of today's response to Bush pardoning Libby. What strikes me as amazing is that Snow repeatedly insists that the President deliberated extensively in deciding the merits of Libby's punishment and personally decided that the punishment was excessive. Yet when pressed as to the reasons, Snow reverses course and claims that the President has faith in the jury system and doesn't have extensive knowledge of what the jury saw as evidence and from witnesses.

• "MR. SNOW: The President has made it clear that, again, he respects the importance of having a jury system and respecting that jury system, where having listened over a long trial to the facts of the case, a jury of his peers found Scooter Libby guilty of perjury.
• Q So he doesn't agree that it's a non-crime, as the mayor said?
• MR. SNOW: Again, I'm not going to try to get into parsing all the particulars. The President is not trying to serve as a fact witness in this case, or even one who is trying to analyze the virtues or defects of the case that were presented to the court. What he does know is that a jury reached this verdict. And he is intent on honoring --
• Q But doesn't he have to decide that in order to exercise that constitutional authority, just in his own mind to have a view of whether a crime was committed or not?
• MR. SNOW: Again, I think what he does is, he understands that he's been convicted, and that to him is sufficient.
• Q So he accepts a crime was committed?
• MR. SNOW: He accepts that the jury has rendered a verdict and found him guilty of a crime and, therefore, punished him for it."

I'm not calling into question the legal right of the President to commute the sentence (although there is a prohibition on the president pardoning in the case of impeachment, that is, he cannot pardon his own crimes), but with Libby operating in such rarefied circles, the President granting leniency suggests (pretty much confirms) that the rule of law does not apply to senior members of the Bush administration. Rather, they operate under an ethic of ends justifying means. They continually disregard laws applicable to the rest of the country: Dick Cheney refuses to comply with an executive order for members of the executive branch under the ludicrous notion that he is not in the executive branch; the President repeatedly issues signing statements on bills that indicate he is not obliged to follow these particular laws; the Justice department (a misnomer these days) can't seem to find anyone who was actually responsible for the dismissal of attorneys, in this case no one is above the law because apparently no one actually did anything; the dismissal of habeus corpus, the white-out of the Geneva convention, etc.