Cheney’s chief of staff receives a full pardon
Libby convicted in 2007 incident involving CIA
WASHINGTON — For months, President Donald Trump has railed against investigators and presented himself as the target of an unfair prosecution.
So when he was asked to pardon former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, who likewise considered himself the target of an unfair prosecution, Trump might have seen parallels — and a chance to make a statement.
The statement came Friday when the president granted a full pardon to I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Cheney’s top adviser before he was convicted in 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the disclosure of the identity of a CIA officer, Valerie Plame. Libby, the president declared, had not received justice.
“I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Trump said in a statement, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.”
The pardon was only the third of Trump’s presidency but amounted to a dramatic coda to a politically charged case that came to embody the divisions over the Iraq War. Libby, who goes by Scooter, was seen by his critics as an agent of a war built on false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and by his friends as a scapegoat for a special prosecutor who was actually trying to bring down Cheney.
Libby has long maintained his innocence, arguing his conviction rested on a difference of memories.
President George W. Bush commuted his 30month prison sentence while refusing to give a full pardon, saying he respected the jury’s verdict.
But Libby’s hopes of overturning his conviction took a turn in 2015 when Judith Miller, a former New York Times reporter and a key witness at his trial, recanted her testimony.