BAD NIGHT FOR THE GOP: LEWIS LIBBY COMES TO MARC RICH'S DEFENSE (after Clinton's pardon)

Lewis Libby, a top Republican lawyer, who is now VP Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told the House Government Reform Committee....that he agreed with much of Bill Clinton's widely discredited op-ed article outlining the former president's reasons for pardoning fugitive tax evader Marc Rich.

In a session that stretched late into the evening, Libby, who represented Rich for several years ending in the spring of 2000, told the committee he believes Rich is not guilty of tax and racketeering charges filed by federal prosecutors in 1983. Libby said he "quite possibly" would have considered applying for a pardon for Rich had Rich asked him to do so.

Libby, who said his law firms collected as much as $2 million for representing Rich, testified he had nothing to do with the application that led to clemency for Rich.

He declined to say whether he approved of the decision to pardon Rich, but he conceded that he called Rich on January 22, two days after the pardon, to "congratulate him on having reached a result that he had sought for a long time." Libby testified he made the call from his home to make clear that he was calling in a personal capacity, and not as a representative of the Bush administration.

In a particularly damaging exchange with Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski, Libby agreed that Rich might be characterized as a traitor for fleeing the country and renouncing his American citizenship. Kanjorski asked Libby why he would call a traitor to congratulate him on his good fortune in winning a pardon. Visibly uncomfortable, Libby had no answer.

For Republicans, Libby's testimony was a sour endnote to what had been a long day of revelations that made President Clinton's decision to pardon Rich seem even more inexplicable than previously thought.

WOW!

Scooter was vice-president of Yale's student Democrats...an active anti-war student activist... out of college he worked for Dechert Price, a law firm that **only** donates money to Democrats...from 1985 to 2000 Scooter was infamous Democrat Marc Rich's attorney (of President Clinton's Pardon-gate infamy)...

Scooter won two awards in 1993 from the Clinton Administration...also did NSC work for the Clinton Administration... and never made a donation to a Republican. His wife was more recently a staff attorney for Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, a position to which Democrats apply a litmus test (either you are one of them or else you don't get on it).

It's not at all reassuring to authentic conservatives that Libby and spouse were hostile to the social conservative agenda, while Libby was holding power in a conservative admin. Libby is the type that have a disconcerting way of popping up whenever a conservative president takes office. They grab whatever top positions they can get their hands on, ones that have veto power over policy-making decisions. Once they get the power, they run off and play in their natural habitat, with the liberal crowd.

Libby represented Marc Rich, one of the most notorious organized crime figures in the world, who renounced his American citizenship to evade prosecution, a man who, while on the run, systematically looted post-Soviet Russia and was buddies with the notorious oligarchs in corrupt deals. Libby's $2M legal defense of Rich paid off with a pardon for Rich in the midnight hours of the Clinton Administration. And yet, within hours, Libby immediately moved into the crucial position of chief-of-staff to Vice-President Cheney, and admitted he called Rich to congratulate him on the pardon. Rich must have been gratified to know he had a friend smack dab in the corridors of power. Having a foot in both political camps, although totally unprincipled, is very handy to push a hidden agenda.

Even scarier, Libby, embedded as Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide, was a sub rosa power in shaping the Bush administration's policies and helped build the case for the Iraq invasion. A "specialist" in national security, Libby had logged long hours in his office near the West Wing of the White House, steeping himself in subjects like "counterterrorism, bioweapons defense and energy policy."

Libby held three WH titles: (1) chief of staff, (2) national security adviser to the vice president, and (3) assistant to President George W. Bush -- a sign of his broad influence.

Looks like, for some, that Libby's links to Marc Rich made him Most Likely to Succeed, enhanced his job prospects, and made Libby largely immune to criticism.

The Libby's dinnertime conversations must have been interesting.

I agree--Libby might be getting less than he deserves. He sounds like a person of incredibly low standards if he was involved in any way with Rich. A legal whore.

What was he doing with Cheney? Wasn't Cheney smart enough to either see through this guy (meaning Cheney was naive or stupid, which I seriously doubt) or this guy is covering for Cheney or (worst of all) was planted there to set Cheney up for a fall.

Why did Libby so overtly lie when he knew that he was doing just that? He's a street-smart lawyer, not some fledging office worker who didn't know the difference.

Who's he protecting and why? Or who's he setting up and why?

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