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When Martha Stewart was jammed up and talking her way into jail, I picked up on one of her defenders, a man named Lawrence O’Donnell, who appeared on TV asking just what was wrong with lying to a cop? To him that was only wrong if you happened to be under oath, in which case it was perjury. He was unaware that people who lied to police in an investigation could be found guilty of obstructing governmental administration because the public didn’t pay millions of dollars in taxes for cops only to have them wasted through the actions of liars who sent the police up blind alleys and on wild goose chases instead of giving them useful information.
The rule that applies here is to tell the cops nothing or tell ‘em the truth, but don’t think you’re free to tell them lies. You always have the option of keeping silent -- even if you were an eyewitness to murder -- but if you talk, do it right.
This brings us to the case of Scooter Libby. Why did he talk to the investigators? Why didn’t he tell them they had no crime to investigate, so therefore they had no right to interrogate him? I can’t say I’ve read the Independent Counsel law in its full efflorescence, but it’s impossible to believe it authorizes anyone to investigate anything in the absence of a crime capable of being charged. In spite of all the smoke that was blown about the so-called “exposure” of Valerie Plame as a secret CIA agent, it was determined early on that she wasn’t one, and hadn’t been one for at least five years. So there was no underlying crime on which to base the case. All the investigators could do was to try to find out if anyone had …what? Damaged her reputation and that of her husband, who had disputed the Administration’s claims about Iraq getting uranium in Nigeria? Claimed she was the Mata Hari who had engineered his appointment to the job? Disclosed that he was still loyal to the Clintons who had made him an ambassador during their administration? So what?
None of these things were crimes or, as I’ve said, connected to a crime. They were nobody’s business except that of the people involved on either side. “Investigating” them was like “investigating” an editorial in the New York Times. What business did the Counsel and his people have in hauling “witnesses “ before grand juries, throwing reporters in jail for contempt, demanding everybody’s records, throwing subpoenas around like confetti and in general raising hell in church? None, I say.
Libby should have refused to talk to the Counsel and challenged him to get a court to order his testimony. That might have been done, but Washington courts aren’t the last word in these matters and the Court of Appeals there often acts to restrain the enthusiasms of the lower courts. As for the Supreme Court, they just about never sanction investigations that exceed their bounds and turn into fishing expeditions. Would Libby have gone to jail for contempt while all this was going on? Jug for the Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the U.S? No way. Would he have had to resign his federal job for failing to cooperate with an investigation as required by law? Not if it wasn’t lawful to begin with, as he would have claimed.
So he didn’t have to talk to anybody but he did, unfortunately though giving them a song and dance routine, at least as determined by the jury. His motive seems to have been to protect the Vice President, as Time magazine speculated, by not admitting that he mentioned Mrs. Wilson (Valerie Plame) to anyone because if he did he would have been asked if he was acting on Cheney’s orders and then Cheney would have become a witness. To repeat, though, if the whole thing was illegal, why should either he or Cheney answer questions about something that was not a crime?
All I know is that any cop in this country knows that he has to have a predicate for an investigation, he can’t start one just out of curiosity. Cops call it “having something to hang your hat on”, in other words an underlying crime justifying an inquiry. Reporters call it a “peg” or a “news peg”, a set of facts that will enable them to build a story that may go far beyond the facts but never completely out of sight of them.
Smart people like Cheney and Libby do strange things sometimes. A previous example of this was furnished by Trent Lott, then majority leader of the U.S. Senate, in 2002. At a 100th birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina he reminisced about Strom’s career and even averred that he’d have been a great president if elected when he ran for it in 1948. This was pure hokum because no one, not even Strom Thurmond himself, ever imagined he was going to be elected president in that year. He had run as a demonstration against federal desegregation of the South in particular and disregard of states’ rights in general. He called his party the States’ Rights Party, not the Segregation Party.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t a segregationist, but it still didn’t mean he wasn’t sincere about states’ rights. This fight has been eternal and universal between government centralizers and decentralizers everywhere. Thurmond never mentioned segregation in his campaign and probably didn’t believe it had any future anymore. But he still didn’t want its end imposed from outside.
It was, and Strom Thurmond acceded. He went from Governor to Senator and changed his ideological clothes on the way. He wrote off segregation and even integrated his own office up to a point while doing all he could to cultivate the black vote at home. Clearly he had traveled a long way from 1948. All the same, Lott was being attacked for praising a segregationist, thereby affording an insight to his own character. He did not point out that his remark was nothing but a polite compliment to a centenarian and although it referred to the ’48 election, could not have referred to the Thurmond of ’48 since that would have been an insult meaning that the old Thurmond was superior to the new one, whose conversion was probably nothing but a pretense. In other words, Thurmond was living a lie and should never have been president of anything. That would have brought Strom out of his wheelchair swinging, party or no party. The right answer, that Lott was obviously speaking of the new man, would have routed the critics by its unanswerable logic. But it was never made, instead there were a lot of apologies that got Lott nowhere and he lost the leadership. Scooter, meet Trent. Trent, meet Scooter. | | |