Slate - Throw Scooter From the Train

[DoYouEverWonder]

Should the White House try to ditch Libby?
By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, April 7, 2006, at 5:58 PM ET

White House officials need a new Scooter Libby strategy. He's a one-man wrecking ball of disclosure. From now until his perjury and obstruction of justice trial is over, he will be swinging through the West Wing, knocking down walls and reputations. Libby couldn't stop this destruction even if he wanted to. He has given hours of testimony about the most secret and inner workings of the Bush administration before the grand jury investigating the CIA leak, and now those words are starting to cause havoc. Wednesday, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald disclosed that Libby told the grand jury that in 2003, Vice President Cheney told him President Bush had authorized Libby to divulge intelligence on Iraq to reporters. At worst the disclosure makes Bush look like a hypocrite. Even at best, it distracts the president and his aides from trying to salvage immigration reform, promote a health-care plan, and take credit for a strong economy.

At the moment, the administration strategy is to duck questions. This is not working. They can't avoid the questions because they're too damaging to ignore. In public, White House officials have stuck to their traditional position: They will not comment on matters related to an ongoing legal proceeding. But then they do comment, asserting that the president has the ability to declassify information. This is an attempt to half-answer questions raised by the new Libby disclosures without being on the hook to answer any more. That's because the other questions are much, much harder. If it's perfectly above-board for Bush to declassify information, then why did Libby peddle that information in such a cloak-and-dagger way? (He asked Judith Miller to present the goods as coming from a "former Hill staffer," a stretch just below saying "a little bird told me.")

http://www.slate.com/id/2139515/

[babylonsister]

1. Seems as if Libby 'ditched' the wh! I'd vote to pardon him to

get the real criminals.