The liberal media have exhibited great compassion for President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, convicted of multiple federal crimes. “The President came to believe that raw politics had infected the process...he saw how political opponents of his — the President’s — were trying to hurt his son....He thought that the treatment of his son had been cruel,” CNN White House correspondent MJ Lee empathized during breaking news coverage December 1.
“The White House concedes that Donald Trump was a factor here,” ABC’s Mary Bruce helpfully added during Monday’s World News Tonight. “The President was concerned that he wouldn’t let up, that a Trump administration would go after Hunter.”
But in 2007, the liberal networks were much harsher after then-President George W. Bush offered clemency — not a pardon — for ex-Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted earlier that year of lying during Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into who exposed the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame four years earlier, in July 2003, to columnist Robert Novak.
Novak was trying to fathom why Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson — a Bush administration critic — was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate reports of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq purchasing uranium from that African nation. Novak later wrote that he cited Plame’s name “in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.”
But Libby wasn’t Novak’s source. Fitzgerald had quickly determined that State Department official Richard Armitage — not a Cheney ally — had disclosed the information to Novak, later confirmed by White House aide Karl Rove. Neither Armitage nor Rove were charged.
As the Washington Post — hardly a friendly venue for the Bush administration — concluded in 2006 after Armitage’s role became public: “[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.”
Still, the media saw the Plame case as a way to challenge the entire Bush administration for what many journalists claimed were lies in the case for the war with Iraq. In October 2005, as the hoped-for indictments from Fitzgerald drew near (remember “Fitzmas”?), former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein hyped: “We are obviously watching and the press is beginning to document the implosion of a presidency.”
“If the case goes to trial, look for an awful lot of people seeing it as a way to put the war in Iraq on trial,” NBC’s Tim Russert opined on the October 28, 2005 Today show, hours before Fitzgerald announced he was only indicting Libby.
“The Libby indictments have opened the door to making the wider case against the Bush administration that they misled the country into war,” Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift argued on the November 5, 2005 McLaughlin Group. “The next logical step is impeachment....”
Libby’s trial began in January 2007. On March 6, a jury found him guilty verdicts on four of the five counts brought by Fitzgerald. “Guilty,” CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric crowed that night, “the highest ranking White House official found guilty of a felony since the Iran-Contra scandal.”
Earlier that afternoon, CNN’s Jack Cafferty growled that a pardon would be “the perfect parting gesture” for what he described as a lawless administration: “The most interesting part of this story will be whether or not President Bush pardons Libby on his way out the door a year and a half or so down the road. Somehow, it would be the perfect parting gesture for an administration that has come to view things like the Constitution and the nation’s laws as inconveniences that only serve to get in the way of their agenda.”
“I got an idea, I got a solution,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews hooted on the June 21, 2007 Hardball. “Pardon him, but send him to Iraq in uniform and put him on the front. Send him to the front. He supported the war, send him to fight it!...In the old days the judges would take a working class kid who got into a scrape with the law and say, ‘Junior, want to go jail or do you want to go join the Army?’ They should say the same thing to Scooter Libby. ‘Want to join the Army?’”
In June, the judge decided Libby’s punishment: 30 months in prison, a $250,000 fine, and two years of probation. On July 2, President Bush opted to let the conviction and monetary fine stand, but commuted Libby’s prison sentence.
It wasn’t a full pardon, a la Hunter Biden, but the media were nonetheless outraged. “Are conservatives as angry as Democrats?” CNN fill-in anchor Suzanne Malveaux suggested on The Situation Room that night.
“There’s going to be a lot of anger out there,” analyst Bill Schneider soon agreed. “I don’t think it’s going to be restricted simply to Democrats. Independents and some Republicans are going to be angry and it’s going to feed into the anger at Washington that seems to be poisoning the mood of the country.”
“Above the law?” ABC’s David Muir announced as he opened Good Morning America the next day. “The President decides convicted White House official Scooter Libby should not go directly to jail. He’s not going to jail at all. Was justice served?”
“There are many people who feel that this was a travesty of justice,” NBC’s Meredith Vieira argued on NBC’s Today that same morning.
On CBS’s The Early Show, viewers heard then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton complain: “What we saw today was elevating cronyism over the rule of law.” Yet the network failed to tell viewers how Clinton’s own husband had pardoned numerous “cronies” in his final days in office, including fraudster and tax cheat Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a big Democratic donor.
“A President who lied us into war... has tonight freed from the prospect of prison the only man ever to come to trial for one of the component felonies in what may be the greatest crime of this young century,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann hyperbolically thundered on his July 2 Countdown program.
On July 3, ABC World News anchor Charles Gibson highlighted the “angry reaction to President Bush sparing Scooter Libby jail time.” Reporter Martha Raddatz pointed out how the President’s inbox was full of requests for pardons and commutations: “There are close to 2,000 commutation requests pending. More than 4,000 have already been denied. During his nearly seven years in office, President Bush has only granted four commutations, including Libby.”
That same night, Olbermann returned to froth once more against both President Bush and Vice President Cheney in a ten-minute “Special Comment” rant: “You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is now irrelevant. But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.”
“It is nearly July 4th,” Olbermann continued, “the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a king who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them, or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them, we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms. We of this time — and our leaders in Congress, of both parties — must now live up to those standards which echo through our history — pressure, negotiate, impeach — get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from its helm.”
“And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely to achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed on August 9, 1974. Resign!...Good night and good luck.”
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
