KEY POINTS:
WASHINGTON - Lewis "Scooter" Libby, once chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, was sentenced yesterday to 30 months in prison for perjury and obstructing justice in the CIA leak case.
It was "a tragic fall, a tragic fall", Theodore Wells, a defence lawyer, said.
The sentence is bound to generate demands from conservatives for President George W. Bush to issue a politically controversial pardon to a leading architect of the Iraq war.
Libby's punishment, which also includes a US$250,000 fine, was at the upper end of expectations. He is the most senior official of any Administration in two decades to face a jail term, and - albeit indirectly - the first senior Bush policymaker to be convicted of charges stemming from the war.
As his lawyers pointed out yesterday in a last-ditch plea for leniency, the former top aide was not found guilty of the criminal offence of leaking the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, but only of lying to the grand jury about when he first discussed her with journalists.
However, that argument did not impress federal judge Reggie Walton, who presided over the seven-week trial and who has a reputation as a tough sentencer. "People who occupy these types of positions, where they have the welfare and security of the nation in their hands, have a special obligation to not do anything that might create a problem," he told Libby and his lawyers yesterday, in an allusion to the high stakes of the case.
The revelation in a July 2003 newspaper column of Plame's identity came a few days after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly accused the Bush White House of deliberately distorting prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction and his supposed nuclear weapons programme.
The leak was seen as a deliberate effort by the Bush Administration to "punish" Wilson. Soon afterwards an independent prosecutor began an investigation that would see a star-studded procession of top officials and Washington journalists though the witness box.
Only Libby was charged and convicted. He listened calmly to the sentence but even with good behaviour faces two years behind bars, followed by two years' probation. On top of that is a legal bill estimated at US$5 million.
The key uncertainty now is whether Libby will be ordered to jail at once, or allowed to remain free pending the outcome of the appeal filed immediately after the original sentencing. Walton will rule on that issue next week. His decision could leave Bush facing yet another very awkward decision.
Since their client's conviction, the defence lawyers' strategy has been to keep Libby out of prison and "run down the clock" by spinning out appeals proceedings until Bush reaches the end of his second term. At that point any pardon would have minimal political impact.
But if the judge decides Libby must go to jail at once, the President is bound to come under powerful pressure from conservatives to issue a pardon immediately - risking not only liberal uproar but a possible backlash against his Republican Party at the polls. Bush's spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said the President would not intervene as long as the appeals process continued.
Yesterday 160 letters to the judge were made public, many of them from members of the Republican establishment arguing that Libby's record of public service entitled him to the lesser punishment of probation.
Among the writers were former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, as well as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
But Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the case, was adamant that Libby should be jailed, for up to three years. "We need to make the statement that the truth matters ever so much," he told the court. Ultimately too, Libby's refusal to apologise for his crime - and thus undermine his appeal for the conviction to be overturned - may have weighed against him.
- INDEPENDENT
