Scooter Libby has been found guilty on 4 of the 5 counts:


Will Scooter spend any time in jail?

Will Scooter implicate Cheney in an attempt to avoid imprisonment?

Will Cheney be investigated as a result of this? Should he be?

Will Bush pardon Libby?

Modified to add a question.

No time in jail.
Fitzgerald has already said the case in inactive.
He probably won't have to but he would if it came down to it.

[quote name='DaffyGrl' date='Mar 6 2007, 10:07 AM' post='209386']
Scooter Libby has been found guilty on 4 of the 5 counts:

[quote]
Will Scooter spend any time in jail?

No

Will Cheney be investigated as a result of this? Should he be?

No and No.

Will Bush pardon Libby?

Bush won't pardon two Border Patrol Officers that shot a drug smuggler in the back, I don't think so.
[/quote]

Now get this, one of the Jurors is Denis Collins formerly of the Washington Post and author of the book "SPYING: The Secret History of History". This case is going to win on Appeal.

I'd like to see a little more explanation here. Why do you think he won't go to jail? Is it that you think lying to the FBI, lying to a Grand Jury, and obstructing justice are not crimes that should be punished with jail time?

If Fitzgerald's criminal case is inactive, is there something preventing Congress from doing this? Or from the case being reactivated? Just wondering, again, what your reasoning is here.



As with BA's response, this seems lacking in any detail. Why do you think this? What does this juror have to do with anything? What does his book have to do with anything? Here's the description of the book from Amazon:



So, again, what is your point exactly?

And why do you think it will win on appeal? Both posts previous do not give much in the way of explanation.

Will Scooter spend any time in jail?

If, as seems reasonable, these are charges that are punishable by jail time, then I would say yes. Although I have a feeling that he will not spend much time in jail, and it won't be for awhile. In our justice system, people with money and power can hire lawyers who will keep them out of jail longer, and generally see to it their stay in jail, if it happens, is shorter. This isn't about partisan politics, this is about wealth and influence. My guess is that if I were to be found guilty on the same charges I would be in jail pretty quick!

Will Cheney be investigated as a result of this? Should he be?

One can hope...

Of course he should be. This administration, and Cheney in particular, have quite a bit to answer for. I'm not going to say they are definitely guilty of crimes, because we don't know enough yet. However, both Cheney and Bush present enough unanswered questions to the critical observer that investigation is warranted. As those who support the USAPATRIOT Act often say, if they're not guilty, then they shouldn't have anything to fear from an investigation.

It is a common truism, that those who gain great power often feel they are "above the law." While this has been made incredibly clear to be true in the Bush administration, it was true as well with Clinton, and Reagan, and Nixon - in fact in one way or another I would imagine it is true of a majority of the men who have held high office. They tend to feel that the "regular" rules just don't apply to them.

Will Bush pardon Libby?

I don't think so. At least, I hope not. I'd think a pardon of Libby would be just another twist of the knife already protruding from the silk-jacketed back of the Republican party.

He will appeal this case. He will win the appeal. If Bushco has taught you noghtin it should be the "wiggle" room is all you need. There's a ton of wiggle room here. This is not dissimilar to what Ken Starr did to Clinton, although Libby did not lie in public in a very clear way. Fitzgerald went on a witch hunt and ended up skinning a cat.

Fitzgerald saying the case is inactive pretty much kills it. He didn't have much of a case anyway. He knew within weeks that Armitage was the "leaker" and within months that no crime had been committed in the first place and went after this perjury anyway. There's no case left.

The odds on a jury decision being overturned where there is no real issue of law are slight. Appellate courts are deferential to a jury's determination of the facts. There doesn't seem to be many evidentiary issues here, since most of the evidence was testimony (the only exception is the recordation of Libby's earlier testimony).

The real loser hear is Cheney and the conservative movment. What the trial showed was the most conservative administration in history fixated on an campaign of personal destruction and disinformation. If the failed policies of conservatism needed to even more discredited than it already is, this trial did it. It showed you cannot trust conservatives in power.

Will Scooter spend any time in jail?

I doubt it. He'll be out pending appeal - after appeal - and they'll try to shop around until they find an amenable judge. Even if he does serve time, it will be nowhere near the amount of time he should serve.

Will Scooter implicate Cheney in an attempt to avoid imprisonment?

If he were going to do this, he would have done it by now. His future contracts with Friends of Bush will be directly proportional to the amount of time served.

Will Cheney be investigated as a result of this? Should he be?

Cheney has been investigated and has proved too slippery and insulated for anything to stick. It's unlikely he will continue to be investigated. The Democratic leadership clearly lacks the political will to investigate much of anything. He will no doubt be subpoenaed in relation to Valerie Plame's civil suit, but he'll probably manage to wiggle out of it. Worst case: he'll simply plead the Fifth and clam up. Should he be investigated? Oh, hell yeah. I might even make an exception for questioning with waterboarding in his case. But it's not going to happen - at least not with any consequences.

Will Bush pardon Libby?

He'll wait on the appeals. Even if Libby's appeals are denied or overturned, he'll proably wait until after the 2008 election.

Will Scooter spend any time in jail?
N/A as Cheney’s former top dog or certainly not his entire sentence.

Will Scooter implicate Cheney in an attempt to avoid imprisonment?
I agree with Wertz. He has more to gain by zipping it.

Will Cheney be investigated as a result of this?
He’s already been investigated. Unless new evidence turns up, no. Don’t hold your breath for new evidence.

Should he be?
Yes, for this and a host of other reasons.

Will Bush pardon Libby?
Maybe after 2008’s election. He’s been reluctant to pardon anyone. However, Bush could hold out until the last moment, in which case he might go on the record as the president with the largest number of felons pardoned in a single incident.

The 2006 Patriot Act Reauthorization bill is making headway. I think Fitzgerald can look forward to a pink slip.

Forgive me, but you seem awfully sure there was 'no case', and the case is dead, and no crime had been comitted... that somewhat extreme point of view seems a bit hard to reconcile with the fact that he was just found Guilty by a jury of his peers on four of five counts.

Now I'm no lawyer, but the fact that he was guilty implies to me that there WAS a case of sorts, that a crime HAD been committed. Appeals are only granted on the basis of law, and there is no guarentee that one will be granted, let alone won. To assume, as you have, that ALL FOUR guilty verdicts will somehow automatically be overturned on a so-far nonexistant appeal is, well, white an assumption.


And Danae, one of the Jurors being a former academic who wrote a book on the history of espionage does not qualify as grounds of appeal, I have no idea why you would presume this is so.

He was found guilty of obstructing the case that was being investigated. Libby was not found guilty of leaking anything to anyone. This would be analogous to someone being charged with obstructing a case of murder where no one ended up being murdered.

The juror in question is also the juror who wanted to know where Cheney and Rove were and that Libby was a fall guy... this juror will be mentioned in the appeal.

Will Scooter spend any time in jail?
Probably not, in answering your last question, I would expect Bush to pardon Mr. Libby.

You have to understand the nature of this case and why it was even brought to trial. This is a situation where two structures of power, the Executive Office and the CIA, were opposing each other. One side, the Executive, used their power to inflict damage on the CIA. The CIA responded by indicting Libby. This case isn't important. If Joseph Wilson's articles was correct and Saddam Hussein never sought uranium from Africa then all that does is make one sentence that Bush spoke untrue. It wouldn't have changed the course of this war. The United States was going to invade Iraq regardless of facts. The lesson to take from this is that justice is served only when the power structures are involved against each other. If Valerie Plame was a supermarket clerk then Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Dick Cheney could have gang raped her and they would have never seen the inside of a court room. But because she was a CIA operative with connections to powerful people she had the ability to respond to this transgression.

Will Scooter implicate Cheney in an attempt to avoid imprisonment?
Bush will pardon Mr. Libby or the sentence won't be severe. There won't be enough pressure on Libby to get him to implicate Cheney.

Will Cheney be investigated as a result of this? Should he be?
Not with the current political climate as it is. Should he be investigated? Yes, along with the President and anybody that was a co-conspirator of this war. They won't be because these are structures of power and they will not inflict damage like this upon one another. Looking back to Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair, it is clear that the power structures will embarrass each other politically, but any sort of substantial damage like jail time will never happen. Ollie North admitted to selling weapons to the Iranians and funding the Contras who were specifically cut off from funding by Congress and what happened to him? He ran for Senator a few years later. Two more examples are the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 Presidential election. Clinton was guilty of lying to a grand jury, but he continued to be President. Bush's victory was disputed by the Congressional Black Caucus and received no support from a Senator because Democrats knew the kind of precedence this would set. One they would not want to encounter in the future, it's best to adhere to the status quo.