Is Obama for a Libby Pardon?

Is Obama for a Libby Pardon? updated & bumped

The General Counsel to his presidential campaign evidently is. I got a heads up to the post via email not long ago. I hadn’t seen it yet today.

Robert F. Bauer argues for a Libby pardon today on the Huffington Post. I wonder if Obama agrees. It’s not out of the ordinary for a General Counsel to a presidential campaign to be, shall we say, contrary. This sure fits that description, because I certainly disagree.

A presidential pardon is finally an intervention by the President, his emergence from behind the thick curtain he has dropped between him and these momentous events involving his government, his policy, his Vice President. By pardoning Libby, he acknowledges that Libby is not really the one to confront the administration’s accusers. Now the president, the true party in interest, would confront them, which is what his opponents have demanded all along. Nothing in the nature of the pardon renders it inappropriate to these purposes. The issuance of a presidential pardon, not reserved for miscarriages of justice, has historically also served political functions — to redirect policy, to send a message, to associate the president with a cause or position. Gerald Ford radically altered the nation’s politics with the pardon of Richard Nixon. Credited with an act of national healing, he also spared the man who had selected him for the vice presidency and whose prosecution might have haunted his party even more than the act of pardoning him. He reshaped with a stroke of the pen the national agenda: this pardon, he told Congress, was meant to “change our national focus.” George W. Bush’s father expressed his contempt for the opposition’s “criminalization” of policy differences, with a batch of pardons for high Republican officials convicted in the Iran-Contra scandals . In each of these cases, the president who issued the pardons was, by determining the course of a criminal matter, redefining its political significance and acquiring in it a personal and lasting place. By pardoning Libby, Bush will have done the same. Presidential fingerprints, so far nowhere to be found in this case, will surface at last, indelibly, on the pardon. … .. The Progressive Case for a Libby Pardon

We’re waiting for the Obama camp to weigh in, specifically, what the candidate
himself thinks about Bauer’s post. It’s an important question to ask. The answer should be interesting. Of course, Obama has already said that the conviction points to just how deeply rooted ideology has become in our foreign policy, so it may just be that the General Counsel is acting out, you know, as General Counsels often do. We shall see.

UPDATE: I just got this via email from Obama’s campaign.

From Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer: “Bob was speaking on his own behalf. Senator Obama opposes a pardon and strongly believes that Libby should be held accountable for his actions.”

Ru-roh. People, I think we’ve got another blogger brouhaha, only this time it’s from camp Obama. I was afraid of this, but I didn’t want to speak before the bottom line was offered by the candidate. Edwards got in a lot of trouble when his bloggers started pontificating privately while publicly working for his campaign, and rightly so let me add. So it begs the question as to why Obama’s General Counsel is going so public with the notion of a Libby pardon, when his candidate disagrees. If Bauer thinks a pardon will finally bring responsibility to the White House door he is short-sided and then some. He’s also missing the point, not the least of which is the cost to our national security when covert CIA operatives are purposely burned for political reasons. Is this what Obama believes passes for being strong on national security; is this respect for the rule of law? It is absolutely impossible to separate the campaign from the General Counsel’s views, especially when you consider most people inside of a presidential campaign are working in the hopes that if their candidate is elected there will be a spot for them somewhere in the presidential staff. Bauer’s rationale for a Libby pardon is one thing, but his political judgment in offering a public post supporting it is another. This is not a progressive stance to take. This has the potential to hurt Obama in a big way. Maybe that’s why the post now has a big disclaimer across the top.

“All the views expressed in this post are those of the author and not of any client of his firm.”