Time Magazine reports today on the “final and painful piece of business” President Bush and Vice President Cheney debated in the waning days of the Bush administration: whether or not Bush would pardon Cheney’s top aide Scooter Libby, who had lied to prosecutors in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case. For over a month, Cheney “had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush” to pardon Libby. Aides said Cheney “seemed prepared to push his nine-year-old relationship with Bush to the breaking point — and perhaps past it — over the fate” of Libby. In the end, he wasn’t pleased with the result:

Cheney’s persistence became nearly as big an issue as the pardon itself. “Cheney really got in the President’s face,” says a longtime Bush-family source. “He just wouldn’t give it up.” [...]

Bush would decide alone. In private, he was bothered by Libby’s lack of repentance. … A few days later, about a week before they would become private citizens, Bush pulled Cheney aside after a morning meeting and told him there would be no pardon. Cheney looked stricken. Most officials respond to a presidential rebuff with a polite thanks for considering the request in the first place. But Cheney, an observer says, “expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the decision … He didn’t take it well.”

Some Bush aides suspected there was “darker possibility” for his motives than simply wanting to save an old friend. As a former Bush senior aide explained, “I’m sure the President and [chief of staff] Josh [Bolten] and Fred had a concern that somewhere, deep in there, there was a cover-up.”

After Bush informed Cheney of his decision, Libby then asked to plead his case to Bush himself, but was directed to White House Counsel Fred Fielding. Three days before Bush’s presidency was to expire, Libby met with Fielding, who “kept listening for signs of remorse. But none came.” Bush finally met with his personal lawyer and trusted adviser Jim Sharp:

If the presidential staff were polled, the result would be 100 to 1 against a pardon, Bush joked. Then he turned to Sharp. “What’s the bottom line here? Did this guy lie or not?”

The lawyer, who had followed the case very closely, replied affirmatively. Bush indicated that he had already come to that conclusion too. “O.K., that’s it,” Bush said.

With just one day left in the Bush administration, Bush again informed Cheney that Libby would get no pardon. In an interview with the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes shortly after leaving office, Cheney expressed his dismay at the decision. “[Libby] was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice,” Cheney complained, “and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush’s decision.”

Today is President Bush’s last full day in office, and according to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, he has decided not to pardon Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff Scooter Libby for his role in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. The move has left many conservatives very disappointed:

“I’m flabbergasted,” said one influential Republican activist, who had raised the issue with White House aides, but who asked not to be identified criticizing the president. Ambassador Richard Carlson, the vice chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative think tank, added that he too was “shocked” at Bush’s denial of a pardon for Libby.

“George Bush has always prided himself on doing the right thing regardless of the polls or the pundits,” Carlson said. “Now he is leaving office with a shameful cloud over his head.”

The right-wing had been mounting a fierce campaign to secure a pardon for Libby. Fred Barnes wrote in the Weekly Standard that Libby necessitated a pardon because he was “an indirect victim” of Bush’s policies. And the Wall Street Journal editorial board claimed that Bush “owe[d] it” to Libby. In July 2007, Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence.

During a recent interview with the National Ledger, conservative columnist Robert Novak was asked if he would reveal Valerie Plame Wilson’s secret CIA identity if he could go back and do it all over again. Novak noted that he has previously said he “should have ignored” what he had been told about Plame, but he now claims he is “much less ambivalent“:

NOVAK: I’d go full speed ahead because of the hateful and beastly way in which my left-wing critics in the press and Congress tried to make a political affair out of it and tried to ruin me. My response now is this: The hell with you. They didn’t ruin me. I have my faith, my family, and a good life. A lot of people love me — or like me. So they failed. I would do the same thing over again because I don’t think I hurt Valerie Plame whatsoever.

But of course, Plame was “hurt” because of Novak’s column — she no longer has a career as a covert CIA agent. Moreover, Plame has said that she feared for her and her family’s lives after Novak revealed her identity.

But Novak ignores the point that Plame’s outing had broader national security implications. In fact, Plame’s CIA job was to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and as one former senior intelligence officer put it, the leak made “it harder for other CIA officers to recruit sources.”

Novak also claimed “it was an important story because it explained why the CIA would send Joe Wilson [Plame's husband] — a former Clinton White House aide with no track record in intelligence and no experience in Niger — on a fact-finding mission to Africa.” Except, Wilson did have experience in Niger, not only as a foreign service officer but as the NSC’s Senior Director of African Affairs during the Clinton administration as he explained to TPM:

WILSON: Why me? Because I knew a lot about the [uranium] business [...] I knew all of the personalities who would have been involved in this sort of interaction, because I had been at the White House during the time when the transaction purportedly took place.

Earlier in the interview with the National Ledger, Novak said that Vice President Dick Cheney is “the most forceful, effective vice president in history.” Given the dark “cloud” that hangs over the vice president’s involvement in the whole Plame saga, it is perhaps easy to understand Novak’s lack of remorse.

Today, the D.C. Court of Appeals dismissed Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against members of the Bush administration for leaking her covert CIA status in 2003. Plame had hoped that the appeals court would overturn the ruling of U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, who had initially rejected her case. Today, the appeals court agreed with Bates, ruling that Vice President Cheney and others were acting within their official capacities:

Government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties, the court said.

“The conduct, then, was in the defendants’ scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States,” Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the opinion.

Plame’s lawyer, Melanie Sloan, is not sure what the next steps for the case will be, but is investigating another appeal. If an appeal doesn’t happen, however, the White House will be forced to start publicly commenting on its role in the Plame leak. For years, officials have been stonewalling, citing the various ongoing investigations:

– “I know that there’s going to be a lot of disappointment with this, but there is an ongoing criminal proceeding. … And so our principled stand of not commenting on ongoing legal investigations is going to continue.” [White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, 3/6/07]

– “I did talk to our counsel’s office because I forgot that there is a civil case that is pending on this issue. I did forget. The Wilsons have filed a case in civil court, it was dismissed, and they are on appeal.” [Perino, 12/12/07]

What will be the White House’s excuse once there are no more cases pending?

It’s already well-known that Amb. Joseph Wilson’s July 6, 2003 op-ed in the New York Times deeply troubled the White House. The piece, “What I Didn’t Find In Africa,” concluded that “some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted [by the Bush administration] to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” The administration went to extraordinary lengths — including revealing the covert CIA identity of his wife, Valerie Plame — to smear Wilson.

Last night on MSNBC, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Ron Suskind revealed to Keith Olbermann more steps the administration took after Wilson’s op-ed. In 2003, the Bush administration tried to bury statements by head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. According to former CIA agent Rob Maguire, the decision to then pay Habbush $5 million in hush money came after the run-in with Plame and Wilson:

And, you know, Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame popped up that summer. As Maguire says, “Everyone was terrified that Habbush would pop up on the screen.” That’s his quote. At that moment, they dotted the “I’s” and crossed the “T’s” on his financial arrangement of his resettlement. And they agreed to pay him $5 million.

Now, by almost any reckoning, considering what he provided and that we didn’t use him for anything else going forward, that would be considered hush money in almost any parlance.

Watch it:

To recap: In order to push the American public into war, the Bush administration not only jeopardized the safety of a covert CIA agent, but it also paid off a wanted criminal to keep its secret.

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ThinkProgress received a statement from Amb. Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson on Robert Novak’s collision today, in which he “was cited by police after he hit a pedestrian with his black Corvette in downtown Washington, D.C., Wednesday morning.” From their statement:

Statement from Joe and Valerie Wilson on Novak’s hit and run:

Our sympathies go out to the victim of Novak’s action. Once again Novak has demonstrated his callous disregard for the rights of others, as well as his chronic inability to accept responsibility for his actions.

We have long argued that responsible adults should take Novak’s typewriter away. The time has arrived for them to also take away the keys to his Corvette.

Five years ago, Novak outed the identity of Wilson’s wife, undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

On June 16, the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena to Attorney General Michael Mukasey for documents related to the CIA leak scandal. In a letter today, Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) notes that Mukasey has not yet “complied with this subpoena” and threatened to hold him in contempt unless he produces a key FBI interview with Vice President Cheney:

I regret that your failure to produce responsive documents has created this impasse, but Congress has a constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the executive branch. Therefore, unless all responsive documents, with the exception of the FBI interview report of President Bush, are provided to the Committee or a valid assertion of executive privilege is made, the Committee will meet on July 16 to consider a resolution citing you in contempt. I strongly urge you to reconsider your position and comply with the duly issued subpoena.

On Sunday, the New York Times published an extensive article examining the CIA’s interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM). The article identified the name of the CIA agent who interrogated KSM, Deuce Martinez.

Yesterday, on The O’Reilly Factor, Karl Rove slammed the New York Times for supposedly leaking the name of a CIA agent. “[T]hey’ve got a very callous view about our nation’s security and interests,” Rove charged:

ROVE: Well, I read their explanation. And basically, it sounded to me like they were saying we put his name out there because we decided we could. And I mean, they didn’t have a good explanation for it.

Rove claimed the United States is put at risk when a CIA agent’s identity is leaked. “Look, they put our country at risk when they reveal the details of a program that saved America from attacks.” Watch it:

How ironic that Karl Rove says that the country is put “at risk” when a CIA agent’s name is exposed. A quick recap of Rove’s role in leaking undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity for political retribution:

– Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper said, “Karl Rove told me about Valerie Plame’s identity on July 11, 2003. I called him because Ambassador Wilson [Plame’s husband] was in the news that week. I didn’t know Ambassador Wilson even had a wife until I talked to Karl Rove.”

– A week prior to publishing his column which outed Plame, Robert Novak spoke with Rove. Novak brought up Plame’s role at the CIA, and Rove confirmed that Plame worked at the CIA: “I heard that too,” said Rove.

In an addendum to the article, the Times explained its rationale: “Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover and…others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news stories and books.”

As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan said recently, Rove is “pretty disingenuous” when he talks about the CIA leak scandal.

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Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson released a statement following former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s testimony yesterday, saying that while his statements “shed some light” on the smear campaign by the Bush administration, they would continue to pursue their civil suit to press for more answers:

Scott McClellan’s book and his congressional testimony shed some light on — as we alleged in our lawsuit — the decision by senior government officials to betray the identity of a covert CIA officer, Valerie Plame Wilson. Many questions, however, such as the role of Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney remain unanswered. Our civil suit, now before the Court of Appeals, is designed to permit us to uncover the truth, to hold to account those who would use their public positions to engage in private political vendettas, and to ensure that future generations of public servants do not engage in such despicable behavior against fellow Americans.

Mr. McClellan’s testimony today underscores why we need to continue to pursue our rights under the American judicial system, and why Congress should also fully investigate the circumstances of the leak, and the subsequent obstruction of justice which is ongoing.

Last year, President Bush infamously commuted the prison sentence of former Vice President Cheney aide Scooter Libby, who was convicted in the CIA leak scandal. “As to the future, I rule nothing in and nothing out,” Bush said afterwards, referring to a future pardon. Testifying before Congress today, Scott McClellan said Bush should not pardon Libby:

Mr. Chairman, I believe that it would signal a special treatment, the same thing that happened with the commutation. And the President has always held a certain standard for a granting pardons, even going back to when he was governor, and I worked for him then. And that is, that the person must first repay his debt to his society, and second, must express remorse for the crimes which he committed. And we have seen neither of that from Scooter Libby at this point.

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Earlier this month, McClellan said Bush should have fired Karl Rove for his involvement in exposing an undercover CIA agent. “He said we were going to set the highest of standards, we didn’t live up to that,” said McClellan.

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