The pardon campaign began almost immediately.

No sooner had word come down in federal court that I. Lewis Libby, a.k.a. Scooter Libby, had been convicted on four felony counts than conservative allies began pressuring the President to step in and effectively overturn the verdict.

The National Review Online was first off the block, publishing a “Pardon Libby” editorial barely two hours after the verdict was announced. The piece called the entire CIA-leak case a “travesty” and the product of “media scandal-mongering.”

The Wall Street Journal followed suit Wednesday, saying Bush shouldn’t even wait for Libby to file his appeal.

“The time for a pardon is now,” the Journal declared.

The website of the Libby Defense Trust, for its part, linked to those and other editorials calling for a pardon Wednesday.

But there’s roadblock on the path to Libby’s salvation at the hands of George W. Bush, Newsweek observes, and it’s a rather significant one.

Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff does not qualify to even be considered for a presidential pardon under Justice Department guidelines.

From the day he took office, Bush has followed those guidelines religiously, taking a stingy approach to pardons. He’s granted only 113 to date, and mostly for relatively minor fraud, embezzlement and drug cases dating back more than two decades.

Bush’s pardons are “fewer than any president in 100 years,” according to Margaret Love, former pardon attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Following the furor over Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich (among others), Bush made it clear from day one that he wasn’t about to issue many pardons.

The president has since indicated he intended to go by the book in granting what few pardons he’d hand out — considering only requests that have been reviewed by the Justice Department already, and under a series of publicly available guidelines.

Continue reading this article in Newsweek …

Today’s conviction of former White House official Scooter Libby dealt yet another blow to President Bush’s beleaguered administration and marked the latest chapter in a record of mistakes, missteps and setbacks growing out of an Iraq war policy that went badly awry.

The Washington Post observes that the Libby trial verdict comes at an especially difficult time for the administration.

New revelations about substandard living conditions and bureaucratic roadblocks for some wounded outpatient soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center have put officials on the defensive over how the government treats war veterans.

At the same time, the George W. Bush and everyone associated with him are coming under intense scrutiny in Congress.

Several of those former U.S. attorneys were testifying on Capitol Hill as the conviction of Scooter (real name I. Lewis Libby) was announced at the federal courthouse a few blocks away.

A guilty verdict for someone who once served at such a high level in the White House carried symbolic power when it was handed down at noon.

But in the immediate aftermath, analysts on different sides of the political system debated whether history will ultimately judge the Libby decision as significant in and of itself.

There is agreement, however, that the verdict was a strongreminder of just how heavily the Iraq war has enveloped the presidency and damaged the careers of so many who have been touched by it.

The cost to Libby could be extraordinarily painful. Once the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Libby now faces prison time.

Only a successful appeal, which many lawyers say is very unlikely, or a presidential pardon could stave off that fate.

But Scooter is just one of a string of officials whose careers have been stamped by the war. Bush’s presidential legacy is tied to the war. Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld lost his job over it. Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of state Colin Powell have all seen their reputations affected adversely.

The Libby case captivated Washington as prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald began his investigation into how the name of CIA official Valerie Plame became public and whether her unmasking was retaliation by officials for criticism leveled by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Fitzgerald’s investigation proved debilitating to the Bush administration during the summer and fall of 2005, as it appeared that not only Libby but White House senior adviser Karl Rove, the president’s most influential political strategist, might face charges.

Continue reading in the Washington Post …

Vice President Dick Cheney will be called as a defense witness in the much-anticipated CIA leak trial involving his former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, MSNBC reports today.

“We’re calling the vice president,” Libby’s attorney, Ted Wells, said in a hearing. After the hearing another attorney for Libby, attorney William Jeffress said he does not expect the Vice President to resist testifying at the trial scheduled to begin in January.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, responded by saying, “That settles that.” Fitzgerald had said that he did not expect to call Cheney as a witness.

“We don’t expect him to resist,” Jeffress said of Cheney’s proposed testimony.

Fitzgerald said earlier this week that he did not expect the White House to resist if Cheney or other administration officials are called to testify.

The Vice President himself has said in a CNN interview in June, “I may be called as a witness.”

Cheney’s spokeswoman, LeAnn McBride, said in a statement:

“We’ve cooperated fully in this matter and will continue to do so. In fairness to the parties involved and as we’ve stated previously, we’re not going to comment further on a legal proceeding.”

She did not say whether Cheney will appear in the courtroom to testify or if his testimony would be done in an other way, like a deposition or taped testimony. Legal experts said they were surprised by Cheney not resisting testifying, citing personal and institutional reasons.

Fitzgerald he does not intend to examine any witnesses on any topic for which, “we expect an assertion of privilege.”

If Cheney appearsm, he would be the first sitting Vice President to testify at court in a criminal case, according to legal experts.

Cheney, who was Libby’s boss at the White House, has said in interviews on CNN and FOX News that Libby is “one of the finest men I’ve ever known. He is a great guy. I worked with him for a long time. I have tremendous regard for him.”

A series of court filings in the CIA leak case provide details of Cheney’s role at the center of an administration effort to rebut an outspoken critic of the White House’s rationale for the Iraq war in the summer of 2003.

Libby is charged with lying to investigators and a grand jury about his conversations with journalists regarding former CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Plame is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson and worked for the CIA when her husband was sent by the agency to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking yellowcake for a nuclear program.

Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, titled, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” that the Bush administration somehow, “twisted” some intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

Fitzgerald offered new details of Cheney’s reaction to the article when he filed in court several months ago the handwritten annotations on the newspaper clipping by Cheney himself.

Fitzgerald argues that Wilson’s article itself lies at the center of the sequence of events leading to Libby’s alleged criminal conduct.

The annotated version of the article shows handwritten notes at the top, and underscores within the article by Cheney, that Fitzgerald says reveal the harsh reaction the Vice President had to Wilson’s assertions about U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The notes by Cheney seemingly question the CIA’s motivation for sending Wilson on the fact finding trip to Niger.

“Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Ambr (ambassador) to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?” Cheney writes.

Libby’s attorneys also indicated today that they did not intend to call Wilson as a witness for the defense. Other government officials and journalists are expected to be key witnesses in the trial, which is expected to last six weeks.