It’s gotten to where the mention of ’subpoena’ means nothing any more. But that may change. It will be interesting to see how Attorney General Mukasey reacts to the request.

From Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (via TPM):

Oversight Committee Subpoenas Justice Department for Plame Documents

Today, the Oversight Committee issued a subpoena to Attorney General Mukasey compelling the production of FBI interview reports of Vice President Cheney and President Bush and other documents regarding the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

From Firedoglake:

Scottie McC doesn’t know it yet. But that’s basically what he revealed this morning on the Today Show (h/t Rayne).

During the interview, Scottie revealed the two things that really pissed him off with the Bush Administration. First, being set up to lie by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. And second, learning that Bush had–himself–authorized the selective leaking of the NIE.

Scottie McC: But the other defining moment was in early April 2006, when I learned that the President had secretly declassified the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for the Vice President and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters. And we had been out there talking about how seriously the President took the selective leaking of classified information. And here we were, learning that the President had authorized the very same thing we had criticized.

Viera: Did you talk to the President and say why are you doing this?

Scottie McC: Actually, I did. I talked about the conversation we had. I walked onto Air Force One, it was right after an event we had, it was down in the south, I believe it was North Carolina. And I walk onto Air Force One and a reporter had yelled a question to the President trying to ask him a question about this revelation that had come out during the legal proceedings. The revelation was that it was the President who had authorized, or, enable Scooter Libby to go out there and talk about this information. And I told the President that that’s what the reporter was asking. He was saying that you, yourself, was the one that authorized the leaking of this information. And he said “yeah, I did.” And I was kinda taken aback.

Now, for the most part, this is not new. We have known (since I first reported it here) that Scooter Libby testified that, after Libby told Dick Cheney he couldn’t leak the things Cheney had ordered him to leak to Judy Miller because it was classified, Cheney told Libby he had gotten the President to authorize the declassification of that information.

Thus far, though, we only had Dick Cheney’s word that he had actually asked Bush to declassify this information. We didn’t have Bush’s confirmation that he had actually declassified the information. In fact, we’ve had Dick Cheney’s claims that he–Dick–had insta-declassified via his super secret pixie dust declassification powers.

“I think it was extraordinarily foolish of me”, states former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, on blowing Valerie Plame’s CIA cover.

Dick thinks it was foolish. I’m thinking “criminal” and “treasonous”. But he apologized to Valerie (the very LEAST he could do), which is more than Rove, Libby and Fleischer did.

It has me wondering so I have to ask… Why do a handful of crooked republicans end up paying for their crime, while most get away with it? Wouldn’t you think they’d all stand together, united in thumbing their f-king noses at the rule of law?

Had to look him up…….

From Wikpedia: As a District Court Judge, Bates dismissed the GAO’s effort to learn with whom Cheney’s energy task force conferred. On July 19, 2007, he dismissed a lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials.
Judge Bates spent two years working for Kenneth Starr and the Independent Counsel’s office during the investigation into President Bill Clinton, specifcially Deputy Independent Counsel under Ken Starr from September 1995 until leaving in March 1997.

A federal judge today dismissed a lawsuit filed by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Cheney and top administration officials over the disclosure of Plame’s name and covert status to the media.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates said that Cheney and White House aides cannot be held liable for the disclosure of information about Plame in the summer of 2003 while they were trying to rebut criticism of the administration’s war efforts levied by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The judge said such efforts were certainly part of the officials’ scope of normal duties.

“The alleged tortious conduct, namely the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s status as a covert operative, was incidental to the kind of conduct that defendants were employed to perform,” Bates wrote in an opinion released this afternoon.

Bates also ruled that the court lacked the power to award damages for public disclosure of private information about Plame. The judge said that was because Plame and Wilson had failed to exhaust other remedies in seeking compensation from appropriate federal agencies for the alleged privacy violations.

More at the Washington Post

By TERENCE HUNT,
AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Thursday sought to put to rest the controversy over his decision to spare a top former White House official from going to jail, saying it was time to move on. He also called on the nation and skeptical lawmakers to stand with him on Iraq, despite a new report showing only mixed progress.

“There’s war fatigue in America. It’s affecting our psychology. I understand that. It’s an ugly war,” Bush said.

The president also said that, while al-Qaida remains a threat to the United States, it has been hurt by his war on terrorism and is “weaker today than they would have been” otherwise. He spoke as a new U.S. threat assessment found that al Qaida had rebuilt its capability to mount attacks to levels not seen since 2001.

At a news conference lasting over an hour that was dominated by questions on Iraq, Bush was asked about his decision ten days ago to commute the 30-month prison sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Libby was convicted of lying and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the outing of an undercover CIA official, Valerie Plame, whose husband Joseph Wilson was a vocal anti-war critic.

Bush acknowledged publicly for the first time that someone in his administration leaked her name to the news media. “And, you know, I’ve often thought about what would have happened had that person come forth and said, `I did it.’ Would we have had this, you know, endless hours of investigation and a lot of money being spent on this matter?”

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

By Larry Lipman
The Palm Beach Post
from Truthout

Rep. Robert Wexler says President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence “is nothing short of (a) political quid pro quo, and Congress must go on record in strong opposition.”

Wexler has drafted a resolution to censure Bush and plans to introduce it when Congress returns next Tuesday. A censure is a rare public reprimand but does not carry any other penalty.

House leaders could take the resolution directly to the floor, but that’s unlikely. More likely is that the resolution will be sent to the House Judiciary Committee of which Wexler is a member. Since this is a “sense of the House” resolution, it would not require Senate approval.

Wexler said Bush’s “intervention is an unconscionable abuse of authority by George W. Bush, and Congress must step forward and express the disgust that Americans rightfully feel toward this contemptible decision.

“Scooter Libby was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice by a jury and was appropriately sentenced by a judge President Bush himself appointed. This deceitful chain of events began with the administration’s falsifying of intelligence on Iraqi nuclear capabilities. It is clear that the perjury of Mr. Libby in this case effectively protected President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other administration officials from further scrutiny regarding the clear political retaliation against former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA agent.”

The last president who was censured was James Buchanan in 1860, so the odds are pretty long against this one being adopted. Previous censured presidents were Andrew Jackson in 1834 and John Tyler in 1842. The House did not use the word “censure” in those instances, but its meaning was the same.

Here’s the text of Wexler’s censure resolution:

Resolution Relating to the Censure of George W. Bush

Whereas President George W. Bush has failed to comply with his obligations under Executive Order 12958 concerning the protection of classified national security information in that the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson as a Central Intelligence Agency operative was revealed to members of the media, and in June 2003 Bush Administration officials discussed with various reporters the identity of Ms. Wilson as a covert Central Intelligence Agency operative;

Whereas on July 14, 2003, the name of Ms. Wilson and her status as a CIA operative was revealed publicly in a newspaper column by Robert Novak, and on September 16, 2003 the Central Intelligence Agency advised the Department of Justice that Ms. Wilson’s status as a covert operative was classified information and requested a federal investigation;

Whereas knowingly leaking the identity of a covert agent is a criminal violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (P.L. 97-200);

Whereas Arthur Brown, former Asian Division chief of the CIA, stated that, “cover and tradecraft are the only forms of protection one has and to have that stripped away because of political scheming is the moral equivalent to exposing forward deployed military units”;

Whereas Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, effectively stopped the investigation into this potentially grave national security crime by lying to FBI investigators, and Mr. Libby’s perjury shielded the Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush from further inquiry;

Whereas on March 6, 2007, in U.S. District Court a jury found Mr. Libby guilty on four counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to FBI investigators regarding an investigation into the actions of the White House regarding leaking the identity of Ms. Wilson in retaliation for her husband’s contention that the Bush administration twisted intelligence facts to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq;

Whereas on June 5, 2007, Mr. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000;

read more at TRUTHOUT.ORG

Keith Olbermann had Joe Wilson on last night, and his response to Bush commuting Libby’s sentence.

“This administration is corrupt from top to
bottom. This President is corrupt to the core”.

- Joesph C. Wilson IV on hearing of “Scooter”
Libby’s sentence being commuted by President
Bush

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
from YAHOO! NEWS

WASHINGTON - President Bush commuted the sentence of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on Monday, sparing him from a 2 1/2-year prison term that Bush said was excessive.

Bush’s move came hours after a federal appeals panel ruled Libby could not delay his prison term in the CIA leak case. That meant Libby was likely to have to report to prison soon and put new pressure on the president, who had been sidestepping calls by Libby’s allies to pardon the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

“I respect the jury’s verdict,” Bush said in a statement. “But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.”

Bush left intact a $250,000 fine and two years probation for Libby, and Bush said his action still “leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby.”

Libby was convicted in March of lying to authorities and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative’s identity. He was the highest-ranking White House official ordered to prison since the Iran-Contra affair.

Bush said of Cheney’s former aide: “The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. His wife and young children have also suffered immensely. He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.”

By Matt Apuzzo
The Associated Press

Washington - The U.S. judge who oversaw the CIA leak trial of a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he received threatening letters and phone calls after sentencing I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to prison.

“I received a number of angry, harassing mean’spirited phone calls and letters,” District Judge Reggie B. Walton said. “Some of those were wishing bad things on me and my family.”

Walton made the remarks as he opened a hearing into whether to delay Libby’s 2 1/2-year sentence. He said he was holding the letters in case something happened but said they would have no effect on Thursday’s decision.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Cheney argues that he should not have to report to prison until his appeals have run out.

Walton has said he is not inclined to grant that request. But even if he rules that way, it is unlikely Libby would be taken away in handcuffs. Rather, it would lead to more maneuvering in Libby’s legal fight.

Libby’s newly formed appellate team - Lawrence S. Robbins and Mark Stancil - are standing by. If Libby loses Thursday, his lawyers have said they will ask an appeals court for an emergency order delaying the sentence. Because one of the issues in the appeal is whether Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had the authority to charge Libby, defense lawyers also could ask the Supreme Court to step in.

Then there is the pardon question.

Libby’s supporters have called for President George W. Bush to wipe away Libby’s convictions. Bush publicly has sidestepped pardon questions, saying he wants to let the legal case play out.

If Bush were to decide to issue a pardon, a delay would give him more flexibility to pick a time that makes the most political sense.

Bush’s father pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others in the Iran-Contra arms and money affair on Christmas Eve 1992. President Bill Clinton pardoned more than 100 people on his way out the White House in 2001.

read more at TRUTHOUT