Financial Times Editorial Comment: Justice is served on an imperial presidency

Financial Times Editorial Comment: Justice is served on an imperial presidency
Published: March 7 2007 22:32 | Last updated: March 7 2007 22:32
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007


The Bush White House seems to specialise in tortured political dramas that are impenetrable to those who live outside the Washington Beltway – not to mention around the world. The Libby affair, which resulted on Tuesday in the conviction of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top White House official, on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, is more opaque than most.

Even the prosecutor in the case has called it a “he-said, he-said, she-said, he-said, he-said, she-said, he-said, he-said, he-said” case. Most Americans, even those whose dismay at the turn of events in Iraq grows by the day, showed little interest in who said what to whom, in this convoluted saga of journalists and White House aides and unmasked CIA agents and lies about the Iraq war.

And even after a verdict, many important questions remain unanswered: the jury found that Mr Libby lied and tried to block justice, but not whether he, or anyone else in the White House, vindictively and illegally blew the cover of a CIA agent because her husband publicly criticised the administration’s Iraq policy – the unproved charge that sparked the scandal in the first place.

But one thing is clear: Mr Libby was the right-hand man to Dick Cheney, the most powerful vice-president in living memory, himself the right hand man to the president. When someone that close to the Oval Office is found guilty of trying to pervert the course of justice, that is a serious blot on the already sullied reputation of an unpopular presidency.

Once again, as so often in politics, a top official has been tripped up not by what he did, but by what he did to cover up what he (or someone else) had done. There may be lessons to be learned here in the cash-for-honours inquiry in the UK, where investigators now appear to be looking more for evidence of a cover-up than for the proof of the crime itself.

But proof of a cover-up does not constitute proof of a crime. Evidence that Mr Libby lied does nothing to prove or disprove the existence of much larger lies, about weapons of mass destruction and the rationale for launching the Iraq war in the first place. Mr Bush’s critics have seized on the conviction as evidence of that much larger deception.

In fact, it is evidence of something that is, if anything worse. Mr Libby’s cavalier approach to the truth betrays an attitude that pervades the White House to this day: an arrogance of power, that pretends government officials are above the law; an expansionist notion of executive privilege that pervades this administration, from the war in Iraq to the treatment of detainees, to the recent sackings of federal prosecutors – and apparent attempts by the US Department of Justice to muzzle them before a Congressional hearing.

The Libby verdict is a welcome if only small step towards reining in this imperial approach to the presidency.