US Politics Mega-thread - Page 115

One takeaway from President Donald Trump’s decision to pardon Scooter Libby -- an aide seen as loyal to his boss – is that the president is signaling to current and former aides who are swept up in the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election: Keep quiet even under legal threat, and you’ll be pardoned later on.

This is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's theory of the Libby pardon. She summed it up Friday in a tweet: "Trump is clearly trying to send a message with his pardon of Scooter Libby -- he has no issue with rewarding those who lie under oath."

And while his motivation is unknown – and one should not put it past Trump to abuse the pardon process in the interest of self-preservation -- the president was right to pardon Libby.

Put another way, nearly everything progressives think they know about Libby is wrong.

Let’s review the history and correct the left’s revisions.

First: Libby, who was chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, did not leak the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA officer. The government official who disclosed Plame's identity to the late columnist Robert Novak was Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state. This is important because Armitage and his boss, Colin Powell, were in a bureaucratic knife fight at the time with Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense. Democrats didn't want the Plame investigation to ensnare the Bush administration's in-house critics. They wanted to get the Bush loyalists, the neocons.

To his discredit, Armitage never owned up to the leak while Washington tore itself apart in 2004 and 2005 when the Plame investigation occupied the focus of Washington much the way special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe does today. And Democrats, or for that matter Plame herself, never showed interest in ruining Armitage the way they ruined Libby.

Libby ended up being convicted of obstructing justice and perjury. He was asked whether he discussed Plame with other journalists. Libby claimed he did not. Other journalists claimed he did.

Even this case is shakier than the partisans would have you believe. Libby's defense was not allowed to bring in memory experts, who could explain why Libby and other journalists like the late Tim Russert would have conflicting accounts of a phone conversation.

Part of the prosecution's case rested on the testimony of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller. In her 2015 memoir, Miller wrote that she was compelled eventually to testify falsely against Libby because the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, withheld an important detail from her, as well as the defense.

Plame's CIA cover for a while was as a State Department official. So when Miller went through her notes about her conversation with Libby about Plame, she noted he said she worked for a "bureau." The CIA does not have bureaus; the State Department does. Had Fitzgerald told her about Plame's cover, she would have better remembered her notes.

Miller's recanting of her testimony (after she spent more than two months in jail for not revealing notes of her conversation with a confidential source) was one of the reasons the District of Columbia Bar in 2016 restored Libby's law license, which he lost when convicted of a felony.

It's not clear that the outing of Plame caused the kind of harm to national security that she and her husband, the diplomat Joe Wilson, claimed. In his 2014 memoir, former CIA general counsel John Rizzo wrote, "There was no evidence indicating that any CIA source or operation -- or Plame herself, for that matter -- was placed in jeopardy as a result of the 'outing.'"

All of this brings us back to Trump's own motivations for the Libby pardon. It may be that he wants to demonstrate his willingness to issue pardons for loyalists. But another explanation is that Trump or his advisers came to see what the D.C. bar saw more than two years ago: Scooter Libby was wrongfully convicted over a leak crime he never committed

On April 14 2018 08:17 Introvert wrote:
The Scooter Libby news is interesting because he was indeed another display of the problem with these far ranging investigations. Trump surely means this as a not so subtle swipe at Mueller, but it was still defensible. Posted the whole thing because it's short. Also it is important for the record that people here reading about the pardon know the actual context.

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https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-13/trump-pardoning-scooter-libby-was-the-right-decision

On April 14 2018 08:44 Plansix wrote:
Libby is an attorney and long time civil servant. He had legal counsel when he was being questioned by the FBI as well, and knew that lying or misleading them would be a crime. “I don’t recall” is an acceptable the question he was asked. There is no justification for him making that mistake.

I also question the article’s assertion that denying testimony “memory experts” places the case on shaky legal ground. And finally, his sentence was commuted by Bush.

On April 14 2018 09:01 A3th3r wrote:
I continue to think that the US does not take China seriously enough as a competitive threat - they have a very big economy and it is not all internally focused on local party politics. Definitely there is some international stuff going on there as well. I guess the ppl in China pay a lot of attention to what is going on in the business world because they are trying to step things up a bit there and make some money in the "non-domestic arena" (i.e. the international arena).

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-12/in-trade-spat-china-has-a-secret-weapon
That is both good and bad. Definitely they have some leverage as far as attacking some foreign companies. For example, I read the article that is referenced here and apparently Japanese businesses were boycotted for a while due to a conflict over some island between China & Japan and their stock prices dipped as a result of that conflict. So without a doubt they can "run things into the ground" and cause some chaos for US businesses. China continues to own a lot of US Treasury bonds that they bought a discount a few years ago and could be looking to sell those. That would probably cause some things to tank in the US marketplace.

I think that Trump is being looked upon as a pest, or, rather, as a person who has some power in US government but that power is limited. That being said, technically the executive branch is only supposed to carry out the orders that the congressional branch comes up with, so, that's fine, in my opinion. The judicial branch exists only to strike down laws that the public considers to be unfair and they are a regulatory body.

On April 14 2018 09:16 zlefin wrote:

Obama tried to do an "asia pivot" during his term, to focus more on dealing with china; but he was unsuccessful in doing that pivot (i.e. the shift didn't really work well/stick) from what i've heard, what with various mideast problems kept coming up and demanding more attention. but I haven't read much on it in awhile.

On April 14 2018 09:22 iamthedave wrote:


Didn't he get bogged down dealing with North Korea and Iran?

On April 14 2018 08:44 Plansix wrote:
Libby is an attorney and long time civil servant. He had legal counsel when he was being questioned by the FBI as well, and knew that lying or misleading them would be a crime. “I don’t recall” is an acceptable the question he was asked. There is no justification for him making that mistake.

I also question the article’s assertion that denying testimony “memory experts” places the case on shaky legal ground. And finally, his sentence was commuted by Bush.

On April 14 2018 09:16 zlefin wrote:

Obama tried to do an "asia pivot" during his term, to focus more on dealing with china; but he was unsuccessful in doing that pivot (i.e. the shift didn't really work well/stick) from what i've heard, what with various mideast problems kept coming up and demanding more attention. but I haven't read much on it in awhile.

On April 14 2018 09:45 ticklishmusic wrote:


He got his bar license back and his voting rights were restored too. I did a little refresher reading and the entire Scooter Libby thing seems weird - like he got in big trouble for a rookie mistake, and it came out it was some other guy who leaked the agent's identity, anyways. It makes you wonder if there was more at play.

Anyways, the pardon does seem much more a signal that he has pardon powers and he is willing to use them.



The TPP was one of the cornerstones of the Asia pivot. It died.

On April 14 2018 10:09 bo1b wrote:
The tpp died because it was an absolute pr disaster domestically. A large portion of it was designed entirely to give western nations, particularly America, a competitive advantage over China. Of course China opposed it.

On April 14 2018 10:24 TheLordofAwesome wrote:

Interesting, where have these been reported?

There is a truly fascinating detail about Cohen buried in the complaint brought by prosecutors in SDNY. The feds have had warrants to secretly read Cohen's emails from a bunch of different accounts for quite a while now.

On April 14 2018 10:00 A3th3r wrote:


No, the TPP was opposed by China. That was the main reason why it died, at least from the US perspective. Not to beat on a dead horse here but there still continues to be a ton of trade that goes on between the US & China and a lot of American companies have made a lot of money on that. I guess there was only about 122 Chevy Camaros that were imported from the US to China and there were about 900k Chevys there were actually just made there on site by Chinese workers for much cheaper than the costs of doing the work in the US. So it is a pretty good deal for them and they avoid the import tax that way.

I guess (no offense to the Chinese) but there is a worry of a Chinese take over of these US factories. If that were to happen then the US would have to pull out of China & both parties would lose some money there. They don't care if Chinese companies copy US companies, that's fine, everybody in the US is just copying the Germans anyways since they are in such good economic shape these days & are in a position of power in the European Union nowadays. In my own personal life, last Friday was payday, so, I actually ordered a hoodie from China via Wish.com and it came a few days ago and it fits just fine. I had to order size XXL even though by US standards I'm just a Medium.