WASHINGTON — The perjury conviction of former senior White House advisor I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was condemned as a "travesty" and a "politicized prosecution" by much of the conservative media Wednesday.
As the critics on the right saw it, an overzealous prosecutor, unable to find evidence of a real crime, turned what a Wall Street Journal editorial called a "trivial matter" into a high-profile criminal case. The Journal editorial accused Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald of "criminalizing political differences. For that, in essence, is what this case is really all about."
"A good man has paid a very heavy price for the Left's fevers [and] the media's scandal-mongering," the editors of the National Review wrote of Libby in a posting on the magazine's website. "Justice demands that [President] Bush issue a pardon and lower the curtain on an embarrassing drama that shouldn't have lasted beyond its opening act."
Amid this fervor, some veterans of an earlier political drama -- President Clinton's impeachment in the late 1990s -- were amused by their political opponents' new views of the significance of perjury and obstruction of justice.
"They thought it was OK for prosecutors to pursue the president for lying about sex, and now they think it's unfair to prosecute someone in the White House for lying to a grand jury about outing a CIA agent," Lanny J. Davis, Clinton's special counsel during that time, said Wednesday. "This is not just hypocritical. It is comical."
If nothing else, the reaction to the Libby verdict shows again that it's hard to separate law and politics in Washington's dramas.
After the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986, independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, a Republican, brought criminal charges against officials of the Reagan White House.
Supporters of the prosecution, including leading Democrats, said it was important to learn the truth about the scheme -- in which the government secretly sold missiles to Iran and used the proceeds to fund anticommunist rebels in Nicaragua -- and to punish the officials who had lied during congressional hearings.
Critics of the prosecution, including many Republicans, called Walsh overzealous and accused him of criminalizing a dispute over foreign policy.
