How awkward. A senior White House aide has been indicted and suddenly in Republican circles the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not the big deal that it used to be.
The indictment Friday of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide, and the continuing grand jury investigation of President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, makes it increasingly difficult for the Bush administration to point fingers only at Democrats for devaluing the rule of law.
But, of course, Team Bush and its surrogates will try anyway.
Days before Libby’s indictment, for example, the conservative spin machine shifted into overdrive with a pre-emptive public relations strike that was astonishing in its bold audacity.
Libby was indicted by a federal grand jury on five counts–one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements in special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name.
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Defenders of Team Bush seized on the fact that the indictment does not accuse Libby of violating national security laws, such as intentionally leaking the identity of Plame, but of lying about how and when he learned her identity in 2003 and told reporters about it.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) anticipated such a development when she expressed the sincere hope on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that, if there is going to be an indictment, “it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where … just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.”
Funny how Hutchison and her fellow Republican senators took “some perjury technicality” a lot more seriously when they tried former President Bill Clinton for it–a charge of which he was acquitted with the help of some Republicans.
Since even fellow partisans were offended by the perjury-is-no-big-deal spin, it soon was displaced in the conservative chorus by variations on the notion that Bush’s critics are trying to turn an ordinary political and policy dispute into a crime.
A day after Hutchison’s statements, The New York Times reported that “allies of the White House suggested Sunday that they intended to pursue a strategy of attacking any criminal charges as a disagreement over legal technicalities or the product of an overzealous prosecutor.”
Indeed, going after the prosecutor is a tactic that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), recently indicted on an allegation of a campaign-financing-money-laundering scheme, and friends are using in Texas in hopes of winning a favorable jury pool. But Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney based in Chicago, has a hard-to-shake reputation as a no-nonsense equal-opportunity indicter.
Yet, the no-big-deal spin persists. It is embodied in the phrase “criminalization of politics,” which was repeated so many times during the past month by Fox TV anchors and commentators that the liberal ThinkProgress.org Web site posted a hilarious online video montage of some of the sound bites.
But, if so, whose politics are being criminalized? Team Bush disagreed with much of the intelligence community in the debate over Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. But there are plenty of legitimate out-in-the-open ways to debate such weighty political and policy issues.
Reality check: The White House had a right to go after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame’s husband, whose op-ed in The New York Times disputed Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa. But, in going after Wilson, the Bush administration did not have a right to break the law.
And the rest of us have the right, no matter how vigorously Team Bush tries to change the subject, to ask questions. For example, why did the administration seem to be far more concerned with silencing Wilson than with responding to his legitimate concerns?
It is OK to ask whether politics are being criminalized. But a bigger problem here appears to be the politicization of crimes.
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