Scooter Libby: Scapegoat

Scooter Libby Goat © Emily Duffy 2007

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Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who has been found guilty of trying to block a CIA leak investigation, is one of the highest-ranking White House officials ever to stand criminal trial.

He was enmeshed in the inquiry into the leaking of the identity of a CIA operative - who happened to be the wife of a prominent critic of White House Iraq policy.

As chief aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Mr Libby had been involved in almost every major decision made by the Bush administration. - BBC News

DNC Chairman Howard Dean on the Libby conviction (Video)

And what about Dick Cheney?

“There is a cloud over the vice president,” the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, told the jury in summing up the case last month.

Mr. Cheney was not charged in the case, cooperated with the investigation and expressed a willingness to testify if called, though he never was. Yet he was a central figure throughout, fighting back against suggestions that he and President Bush had taken the country to war on the basis of flawed intelligence, showing himself to be keenly sensitive to how he was portrayed in the news media and backing Mr. Libby to the end.

With Tuesday’s verdict on Mr. Libby — guilty on four of five counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice — Mr. Cheney’s critics, and even some of his supporters, said the vice president had been diminished.

“The trial has been death by 1,000 cuts for Cheney,” said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. “It’s hurt him inside the administration. It’s hurt him with the Congress, and it’s hurt his stature around the world because it has shown a lot of the inner workings of the White House. It peeled the bark right off the way they operate.”
- New York Times