A very sad day, indeed

From The Washington Post:

The jurors who huddled around two pushed-together conference tables for 10 days, meticulously filling 34 pages of facts from the trial on a large flip chart, believed that Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff had been "pilloried" for a CIA leak that other top White House aides had committed along with him, according to one member of the panel.

[snip]

. . .Libby's attorneys made headway with one of the themes they emphasized throughout the case: that the defendant, as lead defense attorney Theodore V. Wells Jr. described it, was made a scapegoat by the White House to protect other presidential aides who were complicit in disclosing Plame's identity to reporters.

This bizarre verdict only adds to the "Alice in Wonderland" quality of this whole trial. The identity of the "leaker" is known. It is Richard Armitage. This fact was known by Fitzgerald very early in his investigation. The fact that Plame was not "undercover" as defined by the law was also known to Fitzgerald.

What was also known to Fitzgerald was that Wilson was a serial liar, a fact attested to by the 9/11 Commission report.

Put it all together and you have a rogue special prosecutor trying to manufacture himself a place in the history books by recreating Watergate. Except that this time the only result was the ruination of an innocent man.

President Bush should have the stones to pardon Libby.

The lesson that future Republican presidents should take from this is that your administration should be hermetically sealed from the press. No member of any executive branch agency or department should speak to any reporter ever except for a single press spokesmen in each department who is walled off from any knowledge of what is going on in that department. His job should just be to take the press release which he is handed and read it to the reporters at the press conference and answer "I don't know" to any questions they might ask.