| Libby retains 5th amendment by avoiding pardon { July 3 2007 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active) http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/03/1433207http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/03/1433207
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 Commuting Sentence, Bush Spares Libby from 30-Month Jail Term
* Marcy Wheeler. Author of “Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy.” She writes on the political blog The Next Hurrah under the name “emptywheel.”
MARCY WHEELER: Well, in some ways, the commutation is actually worse than a pardon, because with a commutation, Scooter Libby still retains his Fifth Amendment privileges. So if John Conyers tomorrow called up Scooter Libby and said, “We’ve got to talk. I’d like to know exactly what happened when Dick Cheney ordered you to leak something classified to Judy Miller. I want to know whether President Bush actually did declassify it or whether Vice President Cheney was just making that up” -- he does that, and Scooter Libby just says, “I plead the Fifth,” and we still don’t get -- “we” as American citizens don’t get to understand what our president and what our vice president did to retaliate against somebody who was just exercising his First Amendment speech rights.
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