Dwight Stephens

It has been approximately one month since the Scooter Libby verdict. One of the most senior officials in the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, was found guilty by a jury of lying to the FBI. He apparently was trying to cover up efforts by the vice president against the first person to unmask one of several untruths that President Bush used to justify invading Iraq. The trial provided a glimpse of the workings of President Bush’s inner circle, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby and Karl Rove, as they sought to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, who wrote an Op-Ed article in the NY Times in July 2003, stating that he had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein had “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” as alleged by Mr. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address. Mr. Wilson debunked one of the principal grounds used by Mr. Bush for the claim Hussein posed an imminent threat requiring a rush to war.

Highly embarrassed and angered by Mr. Wilson’s column, Mr. Cheney deployed Mr. Libby and others to go on the offensive with their friends in the Washington press corps and assault Mr. Libby’s credibility. The gist of the assault was that Mr. Willson’s wife worked at the C.I.A. and that nepotism was the reason he got the Africa assignment.

The special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, told the press that he felt he had no choice but to seek an indictment when he took over the investigation in December 2003 because he had information that Mr. Libby had told a false story to the F.B.I. and to the grand jury about his conversation with Tim Russert.

Following the verdict, two jurors talked about the verdict. One juror, Denis Colins, a former Washington Post reporter, was particularly outspoken. He reportedly said that the jury felt that it was too much of a leap for them to think that Mr. Libby’s contradictory accounts were the result of bad memory. Even though Mr. Libby never testified at the trial, the jury had access to eight hours of his grand jury testimony, which apparently earned him sympathy as the earnest sounding Mr. Libby politely answered questions.

It turns out Mr. Colins is a childhood acquaintance of NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, giving her a little of an inside scoop with a guy who was dying to tell anyone who would listen the story of the jury deliberations. Asked by her if he had used any lessons from the nuns, he said “[a]ccountability. Do the right thing or get whacked over your head with the bell by Sister Mary Karen.” Was Scooter’s fall Shakespearean? Ms. Dowd asked. “He’s too many steps away from the king,” Colins said. “One of the jurors said ‘He was too busy looking out for No. 1; he should have been looking out for No. 2 and then he wouldn’t have gotten in trouble.’”

And when asked about the calls for Dick Cheney to resign or get the boot, Mr. Colins put his finger on the whole Scooter Libby conundrum. “Here’s the thing: Libby followed Cheney’s instructions to go talk to reporters, but there’s no evidence at all that Cheney told him to lie about it. So the question is, was Libby just kind of inept at getting the story out?” In other words, Scooter Libby feigned forgetfulness during the investigation and that forgetfulness obstructed the investigation. It was bad judgment and it has cost him dearly.

Now, we have the U.S. attorney firing investigation at the Justice Department. What should Congress make of attorney general Alberto Gonzales’ apparent, sometimes incredible, memory lapses.

In an Op-Ed column on 5/3/07 in the NY Times, Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, writes that Congress can impeach attorney general Alberto Gonzales if it believes that he should go but he refuses to step down. He explains that US attorneys, while confirmed by the Senate, serve at the pleasure of the president. Under the constitution, the president has the right to fire all or some of them whenever it suits him. He can fire them for incompetence or for failing to pursue administration priorities with sufficient vigor, or even if he would prefer a political crony to an incumbent, or probably even if an incumbent is pursuing officeholders of the president’s political party too vigorously or conversely for failing to prosecute officeholders of the other party aggressively enough.

That being said, Mr. Bowan goes on to explain that just because the president has the constitutional power to do these things does not mean he has the right to do them without explanation. Congress has the right to demand explanations as part of its oversight function and to inform its constituency. In his words, “[t]he right of Congress to demand explanations imposes on the president, and on inferior executive officers who speak for him, the obligation to be truthful. An attorney general called before Congress to discuss the workings of the Justice Department can claim the protection of ‘executive privilege’ and, if challenged, can defend the (doubtfull) legitimacy of such a claim in the courts. But having elected to testify, he has no right to lie, either by affirmatively misrepresenting facts or by falsely claiming not to remember events. Lying to Congress is a felony–actually three felonies: perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice. . . Instances of phony forgetfulness seem to abound throughout Mr. Gonzales’s testimony, but his claim to have no memory of the November Justice Department meeting at which he authorized the attorney firings left even Republican stalwarts like Jeff Sessions of Alabama gaping in incredulity. The truth is almost surely that Mr. Gonzales’s forgetfulness is feigned–a calculated ploy to block legitimate Congressional inquiry into questionable decisions made by the Department of Justice, White House officials and, quite possibly, the president himself.” Mr. Bowman opines that feigned forgetfulness is an impeachable offense.

And he concludes: “The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional authority of Congress against the impliciit claim of an administration that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an attorney general to the United States Capitol Hill to commit amnesia on its behalf.”

Honesty is one of those virtues that is often perceived as more relative and less categorical than some others. A “white lie” if motivated by a noble purpose may be viewed by some in some situations to be the better option than the truth. Nowhere is the truth in shorter supply, it seems, than in politics, including the politics of going to war and the party politics of staying in power or regaining power. It is no wonder that when career politicians and their “seconds” find themselves embroiled in criminal investigations or Congressional investigations long-held habits of deception sometimes prove to be their undoing.

So to the Bush Administration: With what time you have left and for whatever investigations remain, set aside partisan politics, and, in words an evangelical neocon should appreciate, “then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” A little preachy, but if the shoe fits.