The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
The first meeting, 1987:
In June, George W. Bush goes to Capitol Hill to garner support for his
father’s presidential campaign. Dick Cheney, then a congressman from
Wyoming, tells him he won’t endorse anyone for fear of jeopardizing his
own House leadership ambitions.
By PETER BAKER
Published: October 10, 2013 358 Comments
In the final days of his presidency, George W. Bush sat behind his desk
in the Oval Office, chewing gum and staring into the distance as two
White House lawyers briefed him on the possible last-minute pardon of I.
Lewis Libby.
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“Do you think he did it?” Bush asked.
“Yeah,” one of the lawyers said. “I think he did it.”
In March 2007, Libby, who had served as Dick Cheney’s chief of staff,
was convicted of lying to federal officials who were investigating the
leak of the identity of a C.I.A. officer. For the past two months Cheney
had been pushing the president to grant Libby a full pardon before they
left office. He would not let it go. Cheney brought it up again and
again, first before Thanksgiving, then again around Christmas and
finally throughout January 2009 as they prepared for the transition to
the incoming Obama administration. His lobbying was so intense that the
president made clear to his aides that he did not want to talk with
Cheney about it anymore.
Troubled by the decision hanging over him, Bush had asked the White
House lawyers to re-examine the case to see if a pardon was justified.
Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and his deputy, William Burck,
pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers
had raised in his defense. Their conclusion was that the jury had ample
reason to find Libby guilty.
“If I were on that jury,” Burck told Bush, “I would probably have agreed
with them. You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say
something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the
context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their
investigation, that’s a crime.”
The case had its origins in the politically fraught summer of 2003, when
American troops had just invaded Iraq but were unable to find the
unconventional weapons they had been told were there. Joseph Wilson, a
former ambassador, suggested that the White House ignored contrary
evidence about Iraq’s nuclear program in the months before the invasion,
a charge Cheney would deny. When the news media reported that Wilson’s
wife worked at the C.I.A., the F.B.I. opened an investigation into
whether her identity was illegally divulged.
Libby testified that he first learned Valerie Plame Wilson was a C.I.A.
official from Tim Russert, the NBC journalist. If true, this would mean
he did not disclose secret information he learned as Cheney’s chief of
staff — which would undercut the common theory that the leak came from
Cheney’s office and that Cheney was trying to take retribution against
Wilson by blowing his wife’s cover. Libby’s story clashed not just with
Russert’s version, but also with those of eight other people, including
fellow administration officials, who testified that they talked with
Libby about Wilson before his conversation with Russert. When Russert
disputed Libby’s depiction of events, Libby said simply that he must
have misremembered what had transpired, hardly an indictable offense.
“All right,” the president said when the lawyers concluded their
assessment. “So why do you think he did it? Do you think he was
protecting the vice president?”
“I don’t think he was protecting the vice president,” Burck said.
Burck figured that Libby assumed his account would never be
contradicted, because prosecutors could not force reporters to violate
vows of confidentiality to their sources. “I think also that Libby was
concerned,” Burck said. “Because he took to heart what you said back
then: that you would fire anybody that you knew was involved in this. I
just think he didn’t think it was worth falling on the sword.”
Bush did not seem convinced. “I think he still thinks he was protecting
Cheney,” the president said. If that was the case, then Cheney was
seeking forgiveness for the man who had sacrificed himself on his
behalf.
“Now I am going to have to have the talk with the vice president,” Bush
said. That was the sort of unpleasant business that for eight years he
had left to Cheney. It was the vice president who delivered the bad
news, for instance, to Paul O’Neill and Donald Rumsfeld when they were
fired.
Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff, was also in the room, and he volunteered to handle it.
“Nah, nah,” Bush said. “I can do it.” But as several people close to him
would later attest, the president was dreading it.
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