Ambassador Joseph Wilson conducted his first post-verdict interview tonight with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

Wilson described the reactions of he and his wife to the news, detailed how the CIA is currently holding up the publication of his wife’s book, and explained why the Bush administration should recuse itself from pardon proceedings and leave those decisions to a subsequent administration. Watch it:

Some key highlights:

On his reaction:

I take no satisfaction in this. I think that the idea of a senior White House official being convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury is something that ought to sadden everybody who believes in public service. … I think we can take some satisfaction that the Constitution has been defended by the prosecution, by the system of justice and by the jury of peers that decided Mr. Libby’s guilt today.

On his wife Valerie Plame’s reaction:

Well, I think she wept when she heard the news. I was actually at a restaurant in Washington D.C. and she called me up and she just said, “Four out of five, guilty,” and she was very relieved. I think she will sleep well tonight knowing again that this part of this ordeal is behind us. But I would just say that whatever the last four or five years have been like for us, it has been mere inconvenience compared to what this administration has done to our service people and their families, in the prosecution of a war that was justified on misinformation and lies.

On the CIA holding up Plame’s book:

The CIA is taking a look at it and they have no particular objections to the contents. They are trying to claim that she did not work for them before 2002, or cannot acknowledge she worked for them before 2002, which is sort of an Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass. We may have to litigate that. This is not the USSR. This is America and she has a right to tell her story.

On the possibility of President Bush pardoning Libby:

I think there’s a lot of ethical questions involved. After all, Mr. Libby was an assistant to the president, and so I think there is an implicit — an explicit conflict of interest in the president exercising his pardon authority on behalf of someone who worked for him. I think it would be appropriate for the president and indeed the entire administration to recuse itself, allow the wheels of justice to turn as they must, and if there is going to be a pardon discussed it should be by a subsequent administration.

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The Oakland Press (California Michigan) has joined the Lancaster New Era (Pennsylvania) in announcing plans to no longer run Ann Coulter’s column after her remarks about John Edwards.

UPDATE: Human Rights Campaign has an action alert: “Contact Universal Press Syndicate, the largest independent newspaper syndicate in the world, and let them know that carrying Ann Coulter as a syndicated columnist is not acceptable.”

On Fox this evening, Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes argued that Bush will pardon Scooter Libby because “he didn’t really seriously impede the investigation,” and “he’s been a loyal and effective member of this administration.” Watch it.

In fact, Libby did “seriously impede the investigation.” Count 1 on the jury’s verdict ruled that Libby had obstructed the investigation, preventing special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald from conclusively determining why he disclosed undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity to reporters. As Fitzgerald previously explained: “What we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.”

Libby now faces up to 10 years in prison for the obstruction count alone.

While the White House did not offer much comment in response to the Libby indictment, press spokeswoman Dana Perino notably did not rule out a pardon. Perino claimed Bush “respected the jury’s verdict.” Respect can be shown by honoring the jury’s finding that Libby deserves punishment for impeding a serious national security investigation.

UPDATE: Newshounds notes that while Fox News’ conservatives have been spinning the Libby decision, the network’s purported “liberal” legal analyst Greta van Sustern has never mentioned the Libby trial.

According to a new report in Esquire magazine, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) has suggested that Congress may consider the impeachment of President Bush before his term ends:

“The president says, ‘I don’t care.’ He’s not accountable anymore,” Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. “He’s not accountable anymore, which isn’t totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don’t know. It depends how this goes.”

The conversation beaches itself for a moment on that word — impeachment — spoken by a conservative Republican from a safe Senate seat in a reddish state. It’s barely even whispered among the serious set in Washington, and it rings like a gong in the middle of the sentence, even though it flowed quite naturally out of the conversation he was having about how everybody had abandoned their responsibility to the country, and now there was a war going bad because of it.

Hagel isn’t the only one frustrated. The desire for more accountability over Bush has led to increasing calls for impeachment from the Washington State legislature, the mayor of Salt Lake City, and town hall meetings in Vermont.

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) said pushing for impeachment would be counterproductive because it would break off efforts to recruit conservative support for changing the course of the war in Iraq. “We’re trying to get [conservatives] to vote against the war. They’re coming around. You don’t hear them singing the virtues of George Bush like they used to. But nothing will turn this into a partisan lockdown faster than impeachment.” Inslee added, “Ending the war is what’s important now.”

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Jurors in Scooter Libby’s trial “were certain of the former vice presidential aide’s guilt, but they also harbored sympathy for him as a ‘fall guy,’ one of them said Tuesday after the verdict.” Juror Denis Collins told reporters, “It was said a number of times, ‘What are we doing with this guy here? Where’s [Karl] Rove … where are these other guys?‘”

UPDATE: Jane Hamsher talks to a Libby juror.

60 percent of Americans “want Congress to set a timetable to withdraw all U.S. troops by the end of 2008,” according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll. “The share of people who now call the war a mistake is 59 percent — the same as September 2005 and the highest level in the 58 times the question has been asked since the war began.”

Ambassador Joseph Wilson offered his first response to the Scooter Libby verdict during a conference call today.

“Now that this trial is over,” Wilson said, “the president and the vice president owe the country a much broader explanation of their own actions.” Wilson called on them both to release the transcripts of their discussions with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and called on Bush specifically to apologize for overseeing the outing of his wife:

I also learned today that the president was quoted as saying that he was sorry for Mr. Libby and his family. I wish that he would express his sorrow for what has happened to my wife, whose career was destroyed as a consequence of this, and also to the service people of this country who are fighting in a war that now very clearly was justified by lies and disinformation.

Wilson said he hoped the verdict would teach Libby and other U.S. officials a lesson, that “you don’t abuse the public trust engaging in personal vendettas.” But he said he feared that “they will learn the lesson that several of them apparently learned after Watergate — not the lesson of not abusing power, but rather the lesson…that they should’ve destroyed the tapes.”

UPDATE: FireDogLake has notes from the entire conference call.

UPDATE II: CREW’s Melanie Sloan was also on the call with Wilson. Watch her CNN appearance today HERE.

UPDATE III: John Amato, who was on the call, has more.

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Transcript: Read more

The time it took after Scooter Libby’s verdict was announced for the National Review to publish its editorial: “Pardon Libby.”