| | 'Cheney was over the top' about pardoning Libby
Ex-VP said to be 'outraged' at Bush Former Vice President Dick Cheney is reportedly furious George W. Bush declined his repeated requests to issue a last minute pardon to his former chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby.
Sources close to Cheney told the Daily News that the former VP launched a last-minute campaign in the last days of the Bush administration to secure a pardon for his friend and loyal ally.
Bush had previously commuted Libby’s 30-month prison sentence to keep him out of jail. But that wasn’t enough for Cheney. Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a federal probe into who leaked the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame.
"He tried to make it happen right up until the very end," one Cheney associate told The Daily News.
Over the course of several conversations with Bush, Cheney “went to the mat and came back and back and back at Bush,” said a friend of Cheney. “He was still trying the day before Obama was sworn in.”
At one point Bush reportedly became so frustrated with Cheney’s persistence that he told his aides he would not discuss the matter any further.
From the report in The Daily News: "The vehemence of Cheney's last-minute onslaught has struck some Bush loyalists as excessive. 'At some point you have to accept the decision of the guy who appointed you,' one of them said after learning the details. 'I think Cheney was over the top.'"
Cheney has since taken his dissatisfaction and gone public with it, a marked change from the early days of the Bush administration when the vice president and president were viewed as especially close.
In an interview in the last days of the administration, Cheney told The Weekly Standard that Libby was a “victim of a serious miscarriage of justice.
“Scooter Libby is one of the most capable and honorable men I've ever known,” Cheney said to The Standard. “He's been an outstanding public servant throughout his career. I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush's decision.”
Cheney is not alone in his resentment over the lack of a pardon. The decision not to pardon Libby has created cracks in the formerly impenetrable circle of Bush loyalists.
According the article in The Weekly Standard, "one Libby sympathizer, a longtime defender of Bush, told friends she was 'disgusted' by the president. Another described Bush as 'dishonorable' and a third suggested that refusing to pardon Libby was akin to leaving a soldier on the battlefield."
Elliott Abrams, who served as deputy assistant to the president in Bush's second term, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post said he thought Bush had also made a mistake.
"I think it was a serious mistake on the president's part not to have pardoned him," Abams said.
Abrams himself was convicted for his role in the Reagan administration's Iran Contra affair. President George H.W. Bush pardoned him in 1992.
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