Many Newspapers Give Thumbs Down to Libby Pardon

From Raw Story:



An avalanche of newspaper editorials today is urging President Bush not to pardon I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former vice presidential chief of staff sentenced to two and a half years in jail this week for obstructing justice in the CIA leak investigation.



Fitzgerald, In His Own Words


Fitzgerald, clearly taking the grand-jury secrecy rules to heart, has been exceedingly tight-lipped about the whole case. He's not exactly writing op-eds to defend himself.
But he did address the concern that Toensing raised in his press availability on the courtroom steps immediately after the jury reached its verdict in March.


Here's the exchange, as captured by CNN:


"QUESTION: You've received a lot of criticism in the last couple months, because Rich Armitage had come forward and said he was the first leaker, that you knew that at the beginning.


"Do you think this now justifies your investigation? And what do you have to say to those critics?



"FITZGERALD: I would say this: It's not the verdict that justifies the investigation, it's the facts.
"If people would step back and look at what happened here, when the investigation began in the fall of 2003, and then when I got appointed special counsel at the end of December 2003, what is now clear is what we knew at that time.


"By that point in time, we knew Mr. Libby had told a story that what he had told reporters had come not from other government officials but from reporter Tim Russert.
"It's also now public that by that point in time the FBI had learned that, in fact, Tim Russert did not tell Mr.

Libby that information. In fact, Tim Russert didn't know it. Tim Russert could not have told him.


"And for us, as investigators and prosecutors, to take a case where a high-level official is telling a story that the basis of his information wasn't from government officials but came from a reporter, [when] the reporter had told us that was not true, other officials had told us the information came from them, we could not walk away from that.


"And to me, it's inconceivable that any responsible prosecutor would walk away from the facts that we saw in December 2003 and say, 'There's nothing here; move along, folks.'


"And one responsibility we have as prosecutors is we cannot always explain what we do, why we charge or why we don't charge. But at the end of the day, if we look you in the eye and say, 'We made a decision: Charges are not appropriate,' we have to feel comfortable ourselves that that's the case.


"And none of us on the team can walk away from what we knew in December 2003. . . .


"And so we've brought charges, we went to trial and we've proved the case. So we think the facts justify themselves."