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How Kumbayah! Obama’s Top Attorney Wants to Pardon Scooter Libby!

By SusanUnPC on January 8, 2008 at 2:53 PM in Joseph Wilson, Obama, Plamegate, Valerie Plame Wilson

Those are big smooches landing smack on Scooter’s “other cheek.” I did not know this. But, Jane Hampsher at FireDogLake, who covered the Scooter Libby trial like no other blogger, had plenty to say: “Pardoning Scooter — Still A Bad Idea, Senator Obama.” Here’s the scoop from The Hill about Obama’s top general counsel:

“Obama aide wants Libby pardoned“: Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) top lawyer publicly made the case yesterday for a presidential pardon for convicted White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Obama general counsel Robert Bauer did not ask his boss, a presidential candidate, for permission to write the article, published on HuffingtonPost.com. But Obama’s campaign said the senator would not ask for Bauer’s resignation, adding that he is “still our lawyer.” Obama’s campaign and Bauer told The Hill yesterday that Bauer was not speaking on behalf of Obama when he wrote the piece, and the blog entry carries a disclaimer to that effect. “Never at any time have I written for a candidate or asked a candidate’s approval, and I have not done so in this instance,” Bauer told The Hill. “The truth of the matter is, to sound humbly, I’m just his lawyer.”

“Humbly.” Get me a barf bag. Is this a sign of the true “change” and that fairy tale about getting everyone in D.C. to love each other? Where the guilty go free, and the man who outted a key C.I.A. agent and destroyed her brilliantly-run network gets a pardon from President Kumbayah? Jane tells it like it is:

This may be well and fine for a Presidential candidate trying to massage a potential pardon into position as a campaign issue, but it’s an extremely cynical argument, and I really can’t imagine what the Obama campaign was thinking. This is about the rule of law, not political posturing. And as much as all the “liberal progressives” Bauer is preaching to at arms’ length would like to see Bush publicly tied to the scandal, at this point in time we’d rather see some respect for the judicial process.

Jane concludes:

If you want to tie Bush and Cheney to the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity, it needs to be done in the appropriate legal context. We already have a judicial system, fragile though it may be at the moment. We believe in making it work.

P.S. While Jane Hamsher’s crew did a superb job of covering Scooter’s trial, nobody dissected the issues as well as our own Larry Johnson.