Perjury and Hypocrisy

It's amazing what a difference a few short years can make. Once upon a time, many prominent Republicans believed that perjury was a crime so heinous as to warrant throwing the president out of office. Today, however, we find that many of these same characters believe that any sort of jail sentence is far too harsh a punishment for that very same crime.

There's likely to be stiff competition among leading Republicans for the "biggest tool in the drawer" award over the next news cycle or two, and the final winner probably won't be clear until after the Sunday morning shows are over. At the moment, though, the clear frontrunner is Representative Roy Blunt. (Schmuck-Missouri). Mr. Blunt has, in the space of only a few sentences, managed to combine hypocrisy with a reckless disregard for the truth:

"The prison sentence was overly harsh and the punishment did not fit the crime. The sentence was based on charges that had nothing to do with the leak of the identity of a CIA operative," Blunt said.

The hypocrisy is clear to those who remember some of the things that Blunt had to say about perjury back when a Democrat was accused of the crime. In 1998, perjury was, in Blunt's expressed view, "an attack on the judiciary, on the rule of law."

The reckless disregard for the truth - scratch that, Blunt's lying through his teeth, so let's not mince words - comes with the assertion that the charges "had nothing to do with the leak." For the time being, let's ignore the fact that it's a stupid argument even if it isn't a lie - perjury doesn't somehow become less of a crime just because it involves something outside the scope of the initial investigation. Blunt, of all people should know that. After all, Ken Starr's charges of perjury against Bill Clinton had nothing to do with the Arkansas land deal he was supposed to be investigating - which brings us nicely back to hypocrisy, and Blunt's lead in the "What a Tool" 500 increases by a lap or two.

But never mind that.

Blunt's assertion that the charges had nothing to do with the leak investigation is simply a lie. The charges had everything to do with the leak investigation. Libby was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in the case because he lied under oath - multiple times - to investigators, and because his lies made it much harder for them to determine whether or not a crime had been committed. In the words of the prosecutor:

Let me then ask your next question: Well, why is this a leak investigation that doesn't result in a charge? I've been trying to think about how to explain this, so let me try. I know baseball analogies are the fad these days. Let me try something.

If you saw a baseball game and you saw a pitcher wind up and throw a fastball and hit a batter right smack in the head, and it really, really hurt them, you'd want to know why the pitcher did that. And you'd wonder whether or not the person just reared back and decided, "I've got bad blood with this batter. He hit two home runs off me. I'm just going to hit him in the head as hard as I can."

You also might wonder whether or not the pitcher just let go of the ball or his foot slipped, and he had no idea to throw the ball anywhere near the batter's head. And there's lots of shades of gray in between.

You might learn that you wanted to hit the batter in the back and it hit him in the head because he moved. You might want to throw it under his chin, but it ended up hitting him on the head.

FITZGERALD: And what you'd want to do is have as much information as you could. You'd want to know: What happened in the dugout? Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you'd want to know.

And then you'd make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether they should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, "Hey, the person threw a bad pitch. Get over it."

In this case, it's a lot more serious than baseball. And the damage wasn't to one person. It wasn't just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us.

And as you sit back, you want to learn: Why was this information going out? Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters? Why did Mr. Libby say what he did? Why did he tell Judith Miller three times? Why did he tell the press secretary on Monday? Why did he tell Mr. Cooper? And was this something where he intended to cause whatever damage was caused?

FITZGERALD: Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray?

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.

As you sit here now, if you're asking me what his motives were, I can't tell you; we haven't charged it.

So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.

I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge.

This is a very serious matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter. But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.

Blunt, and the rest of his crowd, are trying to argue that Libby's lies and obfuscations are somehow excused because he wasn't charged with the leak. The prosecutor, on the other hand, seems to be saying that nobody was charged with the leak in part because Libby's lies and obfuscations made it very hard to figure out if the leak was intentional. In the eyes of the rational, that's a fairly good reason for charging someone with obstruction of justice. In the skewed world that is the national leadership of the Republican party, it's a reason for a get out of jail free card.