Fans of the late Robert Novak might remember a minor controversy that erupted in December 2005 when Novak addressed a John Locke Foundation Headliner audience in Raleigh. During the question-and-answer session, Novak suggested that President George W. Bush likely knew the identity of the Bush administration staffer who had leaked to Novak the information that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent.
In his 2007 memoir, Novak explained that he was certain his source, Richard Armitage, had shared the information with his boss, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and that Powell would have passed along that information to his boss — Bush. But Powell had not shared that important information with Bush. And the leak of Plame’s name ended up leading to a felony conviction for Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Now, Arthur Herman shares with Commentary magazine readers the full truth of “The Smearing of Scooter Libby.” Herman takes aim at Kevin Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who hounded Libby.
It is now clear that nearly everything Fitzgerald said about Libby’s role in the Plame case was false—and that it was Fitzgerald, not Libby, who had compromised the truth and the judicial process. …
… In fact, the full story of the Scooter Libby case demolishes two powerful myths that have motivated the left since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and that helped to elect Barack Obama president in 2008.
The first myth is that the main justification for George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs) was a lie—a lie confirmed by Joseph Wilson’s exposure of false claims that Hussein had been pursuing yellowcake uranium in Niger. The administration’s supposed response to Wilson’s claims had been the pursuit of revenge against Wilson by exposing his wife’s covert identity. But as we now know, Libby did not “out” Plame. He was essentially convicted of a crime he didn’t commit—a crime, as Miller’s book reveals, Fitzgerald knew he hadn’t committed but had held as a sword of Damocles over Libby’s head in relentless pursuit of a criminal charge of Libby’s boss, the vice president of the United States.
The second myth is that the Bush administration had had no plan for fixing the deteriorating security situation in Iraq when the war did not end after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. In fact, some in the Bush administration had a very clear strategy for dealing with post-invasion Iraq, and Libby was one of the strongest voices among them. The harrying of Libby by the media, and then by prosecutor Fitzgerald, took out an important voice in the internal debate. One can make a strong argument that it wasn’t the despised neocons or Dick Cheney whose policies triggered disaster in Iraq but rather the acts and policies of Secretary of State Colin Powell and the State Department—including Powell’s chief deputy, the man who really leaked Plame’s identity, Richard Armitage. Armitage kept mum while Fitzgerald prosecuted Scooter Libby for what Fitzgerald knew Armitage had done—and knew even before the Fitzgerald investigation began.
