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July 3, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:31
July 3, 2007, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
You know, usually, ladies and gentlemen, 4th of July, and I know this is the third, but on the 4th of July holiday, everybody goes out and you have hamburgers and hot dogs, you clam banks.
If you're Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy, you do waitress sandwich.
But did you see the White House press briefing this morning?
Did you watch any of that?
At the White House for 4th of July, they were serving steamed liberal.
Oh, the press is just beside itself.
And they've got such a blind spot when it comes to the Clintons.
I mean, you would think that no president ever commuted a sentence before or ever pardoned anybody.
It really is amazing to watch.
There are two different worlds in which we're operating.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome this, the award-winning Rush Limbaugh program here on the EIB network.
EIB Southern Command.
Boy, we had a major, major storm go through here last night.
I, of course, at my fortress compound, am well protected, well insulated, except I keep finding things that have not been done.
For example, I got surge protectors all over everything.
And so nothing gets damaged.
I've got a generator in case we go down.
But last night, the Humidor, actually, the Humidor, which is a walk-in humidor, and the smoke eater system in my library are controlled.
The computer controls the air conditioner.
And that computer got hit and it wasn't protected.
So I don't know how this was.
I had to be hustling around last night and take the cigars out of the humidor in the cooler part of the house because I didn't want to ruin them.
I'd get bugs in them.
And the smoke eater wasn't working.
And so it was emergency last night.
Normally, these kind of things don't happen.
Just I saw it on the radar.
I saw it coming through.
I knew it was going to be bad.
It was cool, too, right in the middle of the light.
Did it hit where you were yesterday?
You didn't even notice it, huh?
Well, it was stunning.
At any rate, I got to bed a little late last night, but everything's cool.
What is a nappy?
It's a British story, and it's from the Environmental Stack today, the great real nappy myth.
I think they're talking about diapers.
They're just as bad for the environment as disposables, admits the energy minister.
You know, if you listen and you wait long enough, you will find that everything liberals tell you is wrong.
If you just wait long enough, they'd be proven wrong on everything.
You know, they went out there and they said, cloth diapers, cloth diapers, you've got to use those.
You can't use these disposables.
We'll destroy the environment.
So everybody went out and started using disposables, I suppose.
I've never been blessed with children, so I don't know about diapers and these kinds of things.
But now it's all, it's like oat bread and coffee was going to kill us and then make us healthy and so forth.
They're just all figuring it out.
Drive-by is all in a panic.
Not only did Scooter Libby have his prison sentence commuted, forecasters said that the tropics are clear.
There's no sign of any tropical storm activity whatsoever.
It is good.
It's not good for the media, right?
It's bad news for the crisis-oriented media.
Of course, there very rarely are storms in June.
So it's really, again, not a story whatsoever.
All right, let me remind you again what we're doing here with our iPhone giveaway today.
We're going to announce the first winner.
We have 10 iPhones.
We're giving away one of them each day starting today.
We'll take tomorrow off because it's the 4th of July.
We're running a best of show.
In fact, hang on a minute.
I have just been sent the name of the first winner.
Let me print it out.
While waiting for the printer to belch out the name of the first winner, here's what we're doing.
We have 10 iPhones, and you can register to win one simply by signing up for a free email newsletter that we send every afternoon after the program.
It's called Rush in a Hurry, and it's just a little tidbit, little Summary of what happened on the program, give you a little flavor of what the full updated website later in the afternoon will look like.
And there are some links in it that you can go to for stories that were covered or monologues delivered.
And it's free.
And there's no obligation whatsoever.
We're not going to give your emails address to solicitors.
We're not going to use it for that purpose.
We're doing this to highlight a feature of our website, which we're very proud of.
We had 155,000 sign-ups yesterday on this.
155,000 signups.
And we're going to be, you know, if you've already registered, don't do it again.
You don't need to.
And if you registered long ago, and if you're a registered subscriber of the free newsletter, Rush in a hurry, you don't need to do anything else.
You are as eligible as anybody who signed up yesterday.
Now, we're giving away these iPhones.
They're 8-gigabyte iPhones.
However, they cost money to operate.
Obviously, we are a class act.
We do not give away things that cause our winners to go out and have to spend money.
So here's what we're doing.
For everybody who wins an iPhone, we're buying you a two-year service contract with ATT.
And we will send you a check, roughly $1,500, that will cover the cost of a two-year contract, which is the mandatory.
You have to sign up for two years with ATT when you get an iPhone.
So you'll get the $1,500 check.
You get the iPhone.
You're going to get a year's subscription to Rush 24-7.
And if you're a current subscriber, we'll extend your subscription by a year so that you can make full use of the podcasting capacity of the site in conjunction with the phone.
The phone works with iTunes and our podcasts of each day's show, which are available soon, like an hour after the program at the latest, if things are working right.
Podcasts, download it, get it at iTunes, download it to your iPhone or your iPod, in this case, the iPhone.
And it's all there.
I've finally got a chance to play with mine a little bit yesterday afternoon and last night.
And everything I had heard about this, well, I'd heard all the hype, and it is worth all the hype.
But the one thing I'd heard bad about it was the phone aspect.
It's a lousy phone.
It's not as good as other phones out there.
And of course, it's got ATT service, which is not the best.
I have to tell you now, this is just me and just where I live.
This is the best sounding phone I have.
Now, I've got, you know, I'm deaf and I wear a cochlear implant.
But this phone, and I don't know why, but just the speaker in this phone, people sound clearer on this phone to me than any landline phone I've got or any other kind of phone.
And I've always got at least four bars of service, which is better than any other service I've had down here other than Verizon.
I'm not going to tell you the worst, not into wrapping people here.
But some of them, you know, we live on an island.
We don't have a cell tower on the island.
We've got to rely on cell service from across the intra-coastal waterway.
But this is, for me, it's just, it's been a delight.
It's been fun to learn to use.
It's everything.
And you will like it too if you happen to win one of these 10.
Let me get back here.
All right, here I have it.
Right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
Oh, we're going to, we're only going to mention last name initials, not full last names.
But the first winner, Tom L of North Platte, Nebraska, who's listening to us on the mighty KODY AM 1240.
Tom may be hearing about this for the first time.
We're trying to get a hold of him by email as we speak.
We'll have another winner on Thursday, and then eight more after that for a total of 10.
And again, you do not, there's no charge of this.
It's a free newsletter that you register for, and that puts you in the pot.
The drawing, you are immediately eligible, whether you've signed up a year ago for this or yesterday or today.
And whoever the 10 of you are that end up having one of these phones, you're going to really dig it because the hype about it is hard to believe.
There's some things that are going to be different for you, like the virtual keyboard is going to take some time for people to get used to, but that happens.
I mean, I'm typing with two thumbs now after only one day.
First day you started out hunting peck with your index finger.
I'm two thumbs now.
And you just keep typing.
It knows when you make a mistake, gives you the choices of the words you meant to type, hit space bar, bam, uses the one you want, and you keep going.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back and continue.
Your phone calls as well.
800-282-2882.
If you'd like to be on the program today, sit tight.
Back before you know it.
Okay, quick little trivia question.
Who sang this tune that's currently playing in the bumper rotation?
There you go.
Somebody knew it.
Katrina and the waves.
What state were they from?
They were from Kansas.
Anyway, greetings and welcome back.
El Rushbow.
I have sort of a Friday mentality here today.
Tomorrow's the 4th of July.
We've got a best of show coming up.
Sturdley, let's do a sort of a modified open line Friday on Tuesday.
Make it easier for you in there.
I can see you're distracted by something.
So we'll just make it easier.
And by the way, for those of you watching on the Ditto Cam, lighten up.
I'm getting so much grief about my shirt because of the vertical stripes.
They say it's washing out and looking odd on their Ditto Cam.
See, this is what I hated about television.
You couldn't wear what you wanted to wear.
You had makeup and all this sort of stuff.
I'm not going to change the shirt.
I'm not going to take it off.
I wore the shirt today because this is what I wanted to wear.
If I start taking into account the way things are going to look on the Ditto Cam, I'm not being me.
If it's worth watching the program, it's worth watching it.
Whether you've got little zigzag lines where my shirt is or not.
Now, I want to go back to yesterday's program, ladies and gentlemen.
A very frustrated moment in this program when I learned that the Court of Appeals had rejected Scooter Libby's appeal to stay out of prison during the appeal of his conviction.
Everything in this case is just senseless.
There was never any crime.
We knew who made the original leak about, what's her name?
It's just unbelievable.
Now, the president is up there meeting with the KGB today.
You've got Vladimir Putin up there at Kennedy Bunkport.
You know, it's time for this pardon.
It just really is.
And with that, the president commuted the sentence of Scooter Libby.
And it's been fun watching the drive-bys last night and today.
Just in a, they're fit to be tie.
Chris Matthews even called in from vacation to get his two cents in on this.
I heard Lanny Davis today.
So when you hear Lanny Davis talk about something, you know that you're listening to the talking points that the libs have devised.
And what Lanny Davis basically said was this, the Republicans thought that Clinton should be impeached over perjury, but Libby doesn't do a day in prison for it after being convicted by a jury.
Now, one of the things that has to gall Landy Davis and the Democrats, you would think every crime, quote-unquote crime, every impropriety that is alleged to have occurred since Clinton left office has a relational point to something Clinton did.
In other words, for the Democrats to come out and be critical of the president's decision to commute the sentence of Scooter Libby, they have to bring in the fact that Clinton also committed crimes.
By the way, Clinton did far more than Scooter Libby did.
Not only did he lie and was found in contempt by a federal judge, he suborned lying.
He was asking his associates to lie before the grand jury as well.
You talk about obstructing justice and perjury.
Clinton should have been indicted, but he wasn't.
And we can't go back and relive those days.
But I just find it fascinating that all of these Clintonistas, When commenting on a case like this, have to go back and say something their guy did.
I mean, those of us who supported Ronald Reagan never, ever had to talk about, well, you know, Reagan had this brush with the law.
Reagan was indicted.
Reagan.
Their guy is their standard.
And it's not a standard they have to be proud of.
So they start comparing Bill Clinton to Scooter Libby.
You know, it's laughable.
My answer to Lanny Davis would be this, actually, Lanny, Clinton did far more than what Scooter Libby is alleged to have done.
He not only lied under oath to a federal judge in the Jones case, for which he was held in contempt, but he told, as I just said, countless subordinates to lie.
He had his lawyer unwittingly submit a sworn false affidavit to the judge.
Clinton repeatedly lied to the American people.
Clinton's lies, in other words, were repeated.
They were committed with forethought.
There was, you know, these were not matters of memory.
The whole thing with Scooter Libby is, he said he doesn't remember who he told what when.
He's got so much going on.
There was no forethought here, but the libs are out there saying, this just proves that Bush and Cheney were in on this.
They are just, they're polluted.
They are so distorted with rage and hatred here.
I mean, this guy has still got a very severe future if he doesn't get pardoned.
By the way, I've got a lot of emails from some of you today who are also very angry at President Bush for splitting the baby, as it were, for not going all the way and pardoning him.
I think the president deserves credit for doing this.
Scooter Libby is a harmless guy.
He's just, he's a loyal servant.
He works behind the scenes, and he's done a lot of things pro bono to help Washington colleagues.
One of them, by way of note, is Richard Armitage, who was in huge trouble, and Libby defended him at no charge.
Armitage sat there and let Libby twist in the wind while all this was going on, knowing full well that he, Armitage, was the leaker of the identity of this woman who was not even covert at the time.
This whole thing has been surreal.
But this man, Scooter Libby, with his wife and family, and I can't imagine that this is a family that's looking forward to too many days before yesterday, 30 months in prison.
And I think this is a major thing.
Libby's going to be free now without fear of having to go to jail and a prisoner ID and all this sort of stuff to fight this appeal while free, while not in jail.
You try it.
You try facing 30 months in the canned federal prison.
I don't care if it's a club fit or whatever, for something as ridiculous and surreal as this was.
This case should not have even been brought.
Clinton should have been indicted.
He should have stood trial.
The issue of a pardon or clemency could be debated if a jury had found him guilty, but it's irrelevant.
Clinton didn't pardon himself.
He didn't have to.
But I think, you know, we're going to go through all the pardons that Clinton engaged in, 396 of them.
And we all know some of the big, he was selling pardons.
Mark Rich.
I mean, how do you think the Clinton Library and Massage Parlor was funded?
Selling pardons?
How about the 16 FALN terrorists?
These are the Puerto Rican gangs.
And Clinton let them.
These guys committed real violent felonies.
Clinton just pardoned them, didn't commute the sentence, just pardoned them with all the way.
And that was, if you recall, there was some relevance to that for Mrs. Clinton's future Senate run because they were Puerto Rican and in New York you want the Puerto Rican vote.
So imagine the thinking, the pandering, imagine the insult here.
In order to get the Puerto Rican vote for Mrs. Clinton, her husband thought he had to pardon 16 Puerto Rican terrorists.
That is classic, classic pandering, and it's also Big time contempt and condescension.
Now, I mean, it'd have been great if the president issued a pardon.
I mean, I agree totally.
But I'm telling you the big burden that Libby faced, 30 days in a federal penitentiary.
You know, if this conviction stands, he's going to be disbarred.
He's going to be prohibited from a variety of rights, including voting, as felons can't vote in many states, trying to fix that here in Florida, of course.
I would have liked to pardon too, but I'm not going to sit around and criticize the president over this because this was something that this is a big deal.
He deserves credit for this.
Justice Department should have never brought this case, should have never created this situation.
For that alone, he should have received the commutation.
This case was bogus from the get-go.
What happened was, we all know it, the Justice Department buckled under to Chuck Schumer's demand for a special counsel.
Schumer was working with Joe Wilson, who wouldn't know the truth if it slapped him on both sides of his face.
And that's what set all of this in motion.
So congratulations to Scooter Libby, and all due credit to the president on this because, you know, this he'd been thinking about this for a long time, by the way.
And there's a story in the Washington Post about how he basically came to this conclusion and decision on his own.
Another story in the Post about how the president and most presidents, particularly at this point in their two terms, live basically isolated lives.
And while everybody thinks there's a giant cabinet around and all these aides and all these decisions are being bandied back and forth, the fact of the matter is, you know, the rubber hits the road.
It's the president's decision.
Whoever really makes it inside, he takes credit for it.
In Bush's case, I think this probably was his all along.
You know, he got some bad advice during this whole case.
People over at DOJ, from what I know, were telling him not to get involved in this case, don't say anything about it.
The Libby case during the trial and all this, not to appear to politicize it in any sense, when it was already nothing more than a political witch hunt in the first place.
The thing that I didn't understand about the White House being so docile and silent is the purpose of this trial and the purpose of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plam's existence was to undermine the thing that the president has been most steadfast about, and that's the war in Iraq.
And he's watching.
Everybody can see it every day.
They're trying to undermine the whole premise.
Bush lied.
There were no weapons of mass destruction.
There was no reason to go to Iraq.
And the White House was sitting around not doing anything about it.
And they start going after all these people at the grand jury, and they finally indict Scooter Libby, even though he wasn't even involved in the leak.
We called it a process crime.
The case should have never brought, it should have never started once the original purpose here, finding out who the leaker was was known by the independent counsel.
So for all of those reasons, actually for that reason alone, I think this commutation of the prison sentence is well worth it.
We'll get some of your phone call reaction to this.
Whatever it is, coming up right after another EIB obscene profit timeout.
Sit tight.
Be right back.
No question about it.
I am the man running the country.
You know it and I know it.
800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the, you want me to say something to me?
You look like you're leaning forward like you're waiting for a moment.
I see they're playing with the iPod in there.
I see everybody's playing with the iPod and not paying attention to the program.
iPhone, yes.
I see it in there.
Nobody is paying attention to the program.
That's what happens when you get the thing.
I had discipline.
I wanted to play with my iPhone yesterday, but I had my responsibilities to host this program, and I delayed it.
Snurdley's in there showing all of our guests today his iPhone.
It's the fastest.
You've got a full board of calls up and I don't know how long.
Let's go to Lubbock, Texas.
Oh, by the way, the iPhone business, I forgot to add every winner, in addition to the iPhone and the two years of service and the one-year subscription to Rush 24-7, Boca Java, spectacular coffee.
Bocajava.com has thrown in a $100 gift card for every winner as well.
TJ in Lubbock, Texas, you're next, sir, your first, too.
It's nice to have you with us.
Hey, Rush, how are you?
Fine, sir.
Never better.
I was just wondering why you think it took Bush so long to do this.
And second of all, do you think because he didn't offer a full pardon that maybe it kind of takes some guilt, like he's maybe admitting to some sort of guilt?
No, Bush admitting to some guilt?
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, like maybe because he didn't offer a full pardon.
Oh, no, no, no.
The reason he didn't offer the full pardon, Bush has used the pardon provision of the Constitution.
And by the way, another thing about that, folks, all of these people, Joe Wilson, this idiot, is out demanding a congressional investigation.
Now, to see if Bush has obstructed justice with the pardon and commutation powers of the president are absolute.
There is nothing anybody can do about it.
The Congress, if they want to conduct mock hearings, they can do it, but they are purely symbolic.
They can't do diddly squat.
Nobody can.
And so they're out there fulminating over all this.
And of course, they're making statements.
And we've got a statement from Mrs. Clinton.
A lot of these people, you would not be, it's as though her husband was never president or husband was never in the White House.
Her husband never pardoned anybody.
John Edwards, who never saw an innocent person that wasn't guilty, is out there.
By the way, there's big problems in the Edwards campaign.
The Edwards campaign are starting to get a little worried about Elizabeth, and she's showing up and saying things and doing things that are not cleared, apparently.
And those of us who've been married three times know how this works.
But the well, that Teresa Hines problem was not nearly what this is shaping up to be.
The Teresa problem was, yeah, you're right.
I don't want to go too far to that because that's the past.
To answer your question out there, TJ, the president said from the get-go that he was not going to do anything on this until the appellate process had expired.
And that's why this is just a commutation.
Once Scooter Libby lost his appeal to stay out of jail, to avoid prison while waiting for the appeal of his conviction, then the president said, okay, that part's finished and I can commute the sentence.
He still faces severe penalties.
He's going to be disbarred.
He's going to be a felon.
He can't vote.
$250,000 fine.
Scooter Libby doesn't have that kind of money.
And so these are, you know, a felony conviction, something like this stays with you.
If Bush doesn't pardon him at the end of the end of his term, you know, and there are conflicting thoughts about that.
Some people have read the president's statements and it doesn't look like there's going to be a pardon.
But Tony Snow today said, no, we've not ruled out a full pardon.
And that just agitated the steamed liberals even more.
The point they were boiling over there in the White House press room.
But as for whether this commutation has any indication that Bush might be admitting guilt in the whole thing is, I don't know where people get that.
There was no crime here, folks.
There was no crime.
The White House did not leak this babe's name.
Richard Armitage did.
There was no cover-up.
There couldn't have been a cover-up because the prosecutor knew before he even convened the grand jury what he was looking for.
He convened the grand jury not to find out who leaked her name because he already knew that.
He was doing a process crime.
He was trying to trip somebody up and make them forget something.
You put somebody, you try it.
You go before a grand jury for six or eight hours and try to remember things that you said years ago.
One little trip up and one little disagreement with another witness, bamboo, you have a target on your back.
In fact, if you listen to some of the statements from Fitzgerald, you can actually get the idea.
He really wanted Cheney.
That's really who he wanted.
But there was no crime.
It was it was that's why this this thing remains one of the most surreal and absurd episodes in the American legal system that I can recall.
Whose name is Lois in Pittsburgh?
Hey, Lois, nice to have you with us on the EIB network.
Hi, Rod.
Hey.
I have a question maybe you can answer.
My question is, how is what the special prosecutor Fitzgerald did by withholding crucial information about Richard Armitage from the beginning of the Scooter Libby case?
How's that different from Mike Nyphong's judicial misconduct by withholding crucial information in the Duke LaCrosse case?
Because it would have eliminated the need for a trial in each case.
Well, you know, it's a good question, but the travesties, the outrages committed by Nyphong far outweigh and dwarf the things that happened here with Patrick Fitzgerald.
The difference is Fitzgerald had been granted almost full plenary power by the Associate Attorney General.
Ashcroft was out of commission at this point.
James Comey basically said to Pat Fitzgerald, you've got the full authority of the Department of Justice and the Attorney General's office.
Do what you want to do here.
And he took it and ran with it.
You know, we're going to learn, it generally takes a number of years, folks, to learn the truth about a whole lot of things.
And some of this makes so little sense that eventually we will find out what drove this.
And what was, I mean, I'm pretty confident of that, that we will, without having to speculate.
Speculation's easy.
You know that politics, I mean, how in the world do you do a trial like this or do an investigation without questioning Wilson under oath?
Just accept everything this guy says when everybody in the world knew that he was making things up and lying about things.
The Senate Intelligence Committee basically discredited him, yet he remains the bulwark of the Patrick Fitzgerald case.
Hard for me to understand.
It's below my pay grade, and I don't understand things that are below my pay grade.
Now, as to your comparison of Nyphong and Fitzgerald, I understand how you're getting there, but how you're looking at it, this is not quite the same.
Draw some parallels here.
Nyphong had exculpatory evidence that he withheld.
He was characterizing these kids as criminals and so forth.
Well, we know what Nyphong did.
In the case of Fitzgerald, he knew the leaker, and he knew that the leaker had done it inadvertently.
He knew all of this, yet he proceeded with an investigation.
And because he could always say, I wanted to find out if somebody else was leaking this name around town and so forth.
And so he creates this investigation, and it's in the context of that investigation that a crime was committed, quote unquote, the crime of perjury.
But it's, I'll tell you where the similarities do converge here.
And that is that if you learn two things, if you learn that prosecutors have no check and balance, they really, I don't care at what level, if they're state district attorneys, if they are federal U.S. attorneys, wherever you find a prosecutor, Look at what it took to get Ny Fuang into trouble.
Look at how many outrages.
There was no way at any process here to stop any of this stuff from happening.
Defense lawyers go to the media, but that's another problem too, because, and this is not so much a political thing, but we all believe in the honesty and forthrightness of law enforcement.
We've grown up believing that they don't lie and that they don't pursue innocent people.
That if they're out there shopping somebody and pursuing somebody, we must think they've done something because they got better things to do with their time to pursue the innocent.
We learn here that that's sometimes not the case at all.
And plus, that unchecked power can lead to all kinds of behavior here that, you know, power gets to people's heads.
Plus, if you're Fitzgerald, and I'm just speculating here, but here you've been charged to get the special counsel to go out and find out this, the answer to all this, and then you find the answer before your investigation starts.
What do you do?
Hey, folks, we don't need to do the investigation.
I know who did this and can't say, but it's over.
Or you pursue the original leaker, which apparently was not in the cards.
So you've got this big charge.
You have this big responsibility and you've got all the money at your disposal.
So you go out and you conduct the investigation just because you want to be able to say after two years and after two years of this investigation, you better show up something.
So the second thing is, what you can learn from something like this is that the next time somebody comes before a prosecutor, and I don't care whether it's some celebrity, I don't care whether it's a genuine hardened criminal, remember this too.
The media will always side with law enforcement.
The media will never question them because law enforcement are great sources.
You'll see in newspaper and television stories, sources close to the investigation tell ABC News, sources close to the investigation.
We know who the sources close to the investigation are.
And they, in addition to their unchecked power, love to use the media to try to nail whoever it is they're going after long before they even get to court.
You know, mess with the jury, if you will, before the jury's even been chosen.
So it's just outrageous.
Both the Nyfuang situation and this are both outrageous in their own ways, but for different reasons.
This case should have never been brought.
It should have never happened.
The process crime should have never been committed because there was no need to conduct the investigation.
Nyfuang case, he knew that these people were totally innocent of the crime and was still pursuing them on that basis and trying to pollute the jury, the potential jury down there and everything else.
We all know why he wanted to win re-election.
And he thought, by the way, he'd get away with it down in Durham, North Carolina, because this stuff doesn't happen to prosecutors, the stuff that happened in Nyfuong.
Maybe now it will when it's warranted.
Brief time out here again, back with more after this.
On the cutting edge of societal evolution, Rushlim Baugh with talent on loan from God.
We're sort of doing an open line Friday on Tuesday here.
A relaxed heading into a holiday type of mentality here.
800-282-2882.
If you'd like to be on the program, AP, headline on the Libby story, Bush wipes away Libby's prison sentence.
Just wipes it away.
I guess commutes just wasn't outrageous sounding enough for the Associated Press.
They had to prime the anger pump the only way they could.
And as is typical of the Associated Press, they get something wrong in the story because he was not pardoned.
Libby remains the highest-ranking White House official convicted of a crime since the Iran-Contra affair.
That's not true.
Who is it?
I was going to ask Snerdley, but he's still playing with his iPod in there or iPhone.
Who is Scooter Libby is not the highest-ranking White House official convicted of a crime as the, well, since Iran-Contra, as AP says.
Who is?
Who is the highest-ranking?
No, It's a guy by the name of Henry Cisneros in the Clinton administration.
Libby was convicted in March, the highest-ranking White House official ordered to prison since the Iran-Contra affair roiled the Reagan administration.
But it was Henry Cisneros.
He was the secretary.
He was a cabinet member, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, appointed to that position by President Clinton.
And Cisneros was convicted and so forth.
And I think he got a pardon, didn't he?
A pardon or commutation?
I have to look that up.
I'm not altogether sure.
Did you hear what Mrs. Clinton said about this, folks?
You probably have by now.
Today's decision is yet another example that this administration simply considers itself above the law.
These people have to have a portion of their brains that they're able to compartmentalize and tell themselves so that you believe it, that they were never in Washington.
They never had presidential power.
They didn't do anything wrong ever.
This administration simply considers itself above the law.
This case arose from the administration's politicization of national security intelligence and its efforts to punish those who spoke out against its policies.
Four years into the Iraq War, Americans are still living with the consequences of this White House's efforts to quell dissent.
This commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.
How in the hell can she say that with a straight face?
How can she say that without realizing she's a national joke when she says this?
Susneros was one of the Clinton pardon batch.
Absolutely right.
He's a much higher ranking out there than the Scooter Libby.
Here's what Patrick Fitz Schumer, the prosecutor, said.
In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws.
It's fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals.
That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.
Prosecutor taking it to the president a little bit here.
Joseph Wilson, Congress ought to conduct an investigation of whether or not the president himself is a participant in the obstruction of justice.
If there were any justice, Mr. Wilson, you would face trial.
Dick Durbin, when it comes to the law, there should not be two sets of rules, one for President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the other for the rest of America.
Even Paris Hilton had to go to jail.
No one in this administration should be above the law.
Two words for you, Senator Durbin.
Mark Rich.
Two more, Bill Clinton.
While for a long time I have urged a pardon for Scooter, I respect the president's decision.
This would allow a good American who's done a lot for his country to resume his life.
That's Fred Thompson.
Patrick Leahy, accountability has been in short supply of the Bush administration.
This commutation fits that pattern.
Senator Golik, this is exactly the kind of politics we must change so that we can begin restoring the American people's faith in a government that puts the country's progress ahead of the bitter partisanship of recent years.
Barack, the magic Obama.
Let's see.
Oh, the Brett girl weighed in.
Only a president clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences could take the action he did today.
President Bush has just sent exactly the wrong signal to the country and the world.
Go get a blow dry.
Call your wife and let her come out and speak for you.
May make some sense.
Constitution gives President Bush the power to commute sentences, but history will judge him harshly for using that power to benefit his own vice president's chief of staff, who was convicted of such a serious violation of law.
That's Dingy Harry, the Senate Majority Leader.
Senator, called your sons before the law does.
The president said that he would hold accountable anybody involved in the Valerie Plain leak case by his action today.
The president knows or shows that his word is not to be believed.
That was the House Speaker, Secretary of the House, Speaker of State, Nancy Pelosi, a dimwit.
And, of course, John Kerry weighed in, but it's not important to say what he said.
He just mentioned he served in Vietnam.
Senator, grab a swift boat.
Get out of town fast.
The circle's closing in on you.
So, George Bush today is the Grinch that stole Fitzmas.
By the way, Scooter Libby was Mark Rich's defense lawyer during his trial, prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald.
Vacum and Jiffy.
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