‘Meet the Press’ transcript for July 8, 2007

MR. GREGORY:  Right.  Before I let you go, big news this week, the president commutes the sentence of Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to the vice president.  Was it the right decision?

SEN. HAGEL:  I was disappointed in that decision.  I, I don’t think it was the right decision.  The, the president, in my opinion, needs to let that system work, especially in light of what he said, or at least reported that he said, that he supported the verdict.  He thought the jury verdict was correct. And I don’t know if America wants to see a president get into selecting, like on a menu, “Well, I’ll pick a little of this and a little of this.  I’ll kind of let that go,” as to how I would handle what our system of justice is all about.  It’s not a selective system of justice.  That’s not what our founders implied nor wrote nor meant when they wrote the Constitution.  Does the president have the power to pardon anyone?  Yes.  I mean, look at Bill Clinton’s pardons.  But I think it was the wrong decision, and I’m sorry he did it.  But that was his decision.

MR. GREGORY:  We’ll leave it there.  Senator Chuck Hagel...

SEN. HAGEL:  David, thank you.

MR. GREGORY:  ...thanks for being here.

Coming next, Bill and Hillary campaign in Iowa, McCain’s campaign in trouble, and fallout from the Libby prison sentence commutation that we were discussing.  Insights and analysis from our roundtable—David Brooks, Anne Kornblut, Todd Purdum and Gene Robinson—all coming up right here on MEET THE PRESS.

(Announcements)

MR. GREGORY:  Our political roundtable with David Brooks, Anne Kronblut, Todd Purdum and Gene Robinson after this brief station break.

(Announcements)

MR. GREGORY:  We are back.  Welcome to all.  The president decided this week to create headlines, to commute the sentence of Scooter Libby, the vice president’s former chief of staff.

And, David Brooks, this is how you wrote about it in your column in The New York Times.  “In retrospect, Plamegate was a farce in five acts.  The first four were scabrous, disgraceful and absurd.  Justice only reared its head at the end.  [The President’s] decision to commute Libby’s sentence but not erase his conviction was exactly right.  It punishes him for his perjury, but not for the phantasmagorical political farce that grew to surround him.  It takes away his career, but not his family.  Of course, the howlers howl.  That is their assigned posture in this drama.  They entered howling, they will all leave howling and the only thing you can count on is their anger has been cynically manufactured from start to finish.” First, why did Bush do it?

MR. DAVID BROOKS:  Well, he did it—I, I mean, they did have an internal review within the White House, and he looked at the transcripts with his staff and they cut out the Department of Justice, and the decision was he was guilty, and they said that’s unavoidable, and they said that to themselves. But then they said, “Did he deserve this?  Was it a political process leading up to this?” And they said “Yes, it was a political process.  His career has been ruined, his reputation’s been disgraced.  Did he deserve 30 months away from his family and they decided no.” So that was the essential political calculus within the White House.

MR. GREGORY:  But Todd Purdum, this was second-judging the judge.  This was not as anywhere near as strong a statement as David made in his column about the entire affair.  The president didn’t go that far, and a lot of people on the right thought he should have in offering this commutation.

MR. TODD PURDUM:  No, that’s true there were people in his base who weren’t happy, and the other interesting thing is, going forward, as my own colleague Adam Liptak of The New York Times pointed out, in terms of creating a precedent the president’s commutation may play in future cases in a way that a pardon wouldn’t.  People would have said, “You pardon Mr. Libby out of political conviction,” but now he’s established his own judgment about whether the sentence was excessive, and every defense lawyer from here to who laid the rails is apt to cite the president of the United States in, in case, case after case.

MR. GREGORY:  Eugene Robinson, this is how you wrote about the outcome of this case in your column this week.  “What led us to this point ...  was an abuse, or at least a misuse, of presidential power...

“Bush was under pressure from the Republican base to give Libby a full pardon. But most of that clamor was coming from inside the Beltway ...  It doesn’t make sense that Bush, at this point, would start fretting about his popularity ratings.

“What does make sense is that the president would feel responsible for Libby’s plight.  Libby’s criminal lies were about his part in discrediting claims that the administration’s rationale for invading Iraq was bogus.  Bush might have decided that since this is his war, he, not Libby, should be the one held to account.  Then again,” you wrote, “Bush might have worried that sitting in prison, with time on his hands, novelist Libby might turn his pen to a nonfiction memoir of his White House years.  ‘High Crimes and Misdemeanors’ would have been a good working title.” The suggestion there, that in fact a pardon may still be in the offing to keep Scooter Libby quiet.

MR. EUGENE ROBINSON:  Well, it’s kind of “The Sopranos” scenario, you know, he knew too much, or—I—who, who knows the specific reason for the commutation.  I think it could be either of those.  I think it was wrong.  I mean, where, where was the politics in this process?  This was a Republican prosecutor, this was a, a nonpartisan jury, this was a judge—the judge who threw the book at Scooter Libby was appointed by George W. Bush.  So where, where was the partisan witch hunt in this?  He lied to the grand jury, the sentence was not way out of line with what others have received for similar crimes.  So I, you know, it, the—what was political here was, was the commutation.

MR. GREGORY:  The campaign trail was obviously abuzz with this, Anne Kornblut, reaction coming very quickly, notably from the Clintons.  Hillary and Bill Clinton campaigning in Iowa this week, and they both jumped into the fray on this.  Let’s watch.

(Videotape, Monday)

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY):  And what we saw today was elevating cronyism over the rule of law.  And what we saw today was further evidence that this administration has no regard whatsoever for what needs to be held sacred.  And when I’m president, we’re going to get back to cherishing the Constitution, upholding the rule of law, and putting forth the best values of America for the entire world to see again.

(End videotape)

(Audiotape, July 3, 2007)

MR. BILL CLINTON:  You’ve got to understand I think that this is consistent with their philosophy.  They believe that they should be able to do what they want to do and that the law is a minor obstacle.

(End audiotape)

MR. GREGORY:  Those responses raising a lot of eyebrows.  Let’s not forget that it was President Bill Clinton who pardoned financier and fugitive Mark Rich after tax evasion, and his wife, of course, a big Democratic donor.  And the Clinton administration, too, bypassed the Justice Department guidelines on the pardon procedure.  Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, summed it up this way:  “I don’t know what Arkansan is for chutzpah, but this is a gigantic case of it.” Anne Kornblut:

MS. ANNE KORNBLUT:  Well, it was really remarkable on the campaign trail in Iowa, as you mentioned.  When Hillary Clinton came out and said that in Des Moines, everyone was sort of—their eyebrows raised, and looked at one another, and the next day she instantly got questions from reporters about it. It was the one and only time she mentioned it, and aides on the campaign bus said, “Well, what were we going to do, not bring it up?” But it does really point to the double-edged sword of her campaigning with Bill Clinton, for one, and also looking back to the Clinton administration as part of her campaign strategy.  He not only pardoned Mark Rich, he pardoned dozens of other people at the very end of his term.  And rather than talking about her campaigning in Iowa, we were talking about his pardons and the downside of his administration, rather than the upside, which is what they wanted to talk about, the jobs and so forth in the 1990s.

MR. GREGORY:  But really, there was no way to, to ignore it.  And particularly on the left, you, you know, the liberal base wants to hear about this issue and wants to hear Hillary Clinton and the other candidates bash the president for it, right?

MR. BROOKS:  Well, that’s the essential dilemma she faces.  Listen, the bottom line of the Libby case was that it—whether you’re a conservative or, or liberal, it was politics as usual.  Whether you think the slander at Libby was politics as usual or the commutation was politics as usual, the bottom line people are going to take away from this is that people in Washington don’t play by the rules the rest of us do.  So for—Clinton’s essential problem is, is she politics as usual or is she a change?  Obama is now the change, she’s politics in—as usual.  And she’s somehow get a—got to get out of that politics as usual mold.  I think Bill Clinton can be very effective for her when he does that, when he’s the post president, post ambition, sort of larger picture, big think, all that kind of crap.  And—but, but when she’s just attacking, when she’s just in the mode of just another spin doctor, then she’s poison to herself.

MR. GREGORY:  What—Michael Kinsley had an interesting point in The New York Times this week in his op-ed in which he said the lying really wasn’t the issue, when—whether it came to Bill Clinton lying under oath or whether it was Scooter Libby.  The issue with Clinton was his sexual behavior or just Republicans looking for ammunition to take him down because they didn’t like his ideas, depending upon your point of view.  And, and when it came to Libby, it was really about the prosecution of the war, the evidence they used, what they did to people who tried to prevent alternative information.  Was this a kind of criminalizing of, of political beliefs?

MR. ROBINSON:  I, I think, in political circles and, to a certain extent, in public opinion, it, it might have been.  I don’t think it was, actually, in the, in the actual process that led to Scooter Libby’s conviction.  Patrick Fitzgerald, the, the special prosecutor, just kind of plodded straight ahead until nobody, you know, he didn’t, nobody could tell him to stop.  Nobody was supposed to tell him to stop.  And he reached what was a, was a logical point. I mean, he put him in front of a grand jury.  He didn’t tell the truth.  He, he, he—so, you know, he proceeded with charges, and, and he was convicted. So I don’t think that what actually happened was political.  I think everything around it was.

MR. GREGORY:  David:

MR. BROOKS:  But the—what people will take away from it is that a lot of people pretended to be outraged by the outing of the CIA agent until that turned out to be Richard Armitage and not Karl Rove, and then somehow they weren’t outraged by that fact.  Then they’ll take away from it the fact that everybody who defended Clinton for lying under oath was suddenly outraged by Libby.  People who were outraged by Clinton were unoutraged by Libby, and that basically your, your opinions were entirely determined by partisanship and that there was very little honest looking at the truth.  And then you had the special prosecutor, who did as every special prosecutor does, which is to pick his little course and then just drive it beyond all reason.  And, and it seems to me it’s appropriate to look at the whole mess that this encapsulates and to think Washington is screwed up.  And I think that’s why, at the bottom line, it helps Obama, it helps Bloomberg.

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