Scooter Libby Whines That ‘The World’s Not Just’

THINK PROGRESS

Former Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, who was found guilty in 2007 on four charges of essentially lying about his role in the campaign to disclose the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, appeared on Fox News last night for a typical softball interview.

Recall, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pinned blame on Libby for being Dick Cheney’s fall guy. “There is a cloud over the vice president. … And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice,” Fitzgerald said of Libby. Even after President Bush commuted Libby’s 30-month sentence, Libby is still complaining that “the world’s not just,” but in doing so, claims he doesn’t want to “whine”:

CROWLEY: Scooter, a final question for you. That absurd political witch-hunt that you were subjected to during the Valerie Plame case, your sentence was commuted, but you never did, in fact, get a pardon. Are you still hopeful that eventually you might get a pardon?

LIBBY: […] I learned two things from this. One is the world’s not just. And the second is it doesn’t do a lot of good to whine.

CROWLEY: You’re a class act, Scooter Libby. And had Monica Crowley been president of the United States, you would have gotten that pardon.

Watch it:

Libby, an architect of the Iraq war who spent much of his time propagating false intelligence, is now engaged in a campaign to urge military action against Iran. He argued last night that sanctions aren’t working and that “we have a problem.” When Crowley asked Libby if there was anything more that the Bush administration could have done against Iran, he responded, “I would say that back in 2003 or so, there was more that might have been done with the Iranian opposition, for example. At that point, they were seven years away from a nuclear weapon.”

At the time she was outed by Libby and his White House colleagues in 2003, Valerie Plame was “involved in operations to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.” Firedoglake’s Marcy Wheeler notes the irony: “You know. 2003. The year he outed a CIA spy trying to prevent Iran from getting nukes? Maybe the thing to do in 2003 would have been not outing one of the woman hunting down those nukes?”