Scooter Libby, the former cheif of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, convincted in March of two counts of perjury, one count of obstructing justice in a grand jury investigation, and one of the two counts of making false statements to federal investigators, will spent the next 30 months in jail.
I still think he's the fall guy and now he will be in the jail for as long as the people he fell for are in power.
Pathetic.
The AP has released a fantastic list of scandals erupting from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the moment;
Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a grand jury investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. His trial also implicated top political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney in a campaign to discredit her husband, Iraq war critic and retired ambassador Joe Wilson. Libby, who plans an appeal, is awaiting a June 5 sentencing.
• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is fighting to hold onto his job in the face of congressional investigations into his role in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Two top aides have resigned in the investigation into whether the firings were politically motivated. Emails and other evidence released by the Justice Deparment suggest that Rove played a part in the process. Other e-mails, sent on Republican party accounts, either have disappeared or were erased.
• Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank and a former deputy defense secretary, acknowledged he helped arrange a large pay raise for his female companion when she was transferred to the State Department but remained on the bank payroll. The incident intensified calls at the bank for his resignation.
• J. Steven Griles, an oil and gas lobbyist who became deputy Interior Secretary J., last month became the highest-ranking Bush administration official convicted in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal, pleading guilty to obstructing justice by lying to a Senate committee about his relationship with the convicted lobbyist. Abramoff repeatedly sought Griles' intervention at Interior on behalf of Indian tribal clients.
• Former White House aide, David H. Safavian, was convicted last year of lying to government investigators about his ties to Abramoff and faces a 180-month prison sentence.
• Roger Stillwell, a former Interior Department official, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for not reporting tickets he received from Abramoff.
• Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the top Justice Department prosecutor in the environmental division until January, bought a $980,000 beach house in South Carolina with ConocoPhillips lobbyist Donald R. Duncan and oil and gas lobbyist Griles. Soon thereafter, she signed an agreement giving the oil company more time to clean up air pollution at some of its refineries. Congressional Democrats have denounced the arrangement.
• Matteo Fontana, a Department of Education official who oversaw the student loan industry, was put on leave last week after disclosure that he owned at least $100,000 worth of stock in a student loan company.
• Claude Allen, who had been Bush's domestic policy adviser, pleaded guilty to theft in making phony returns at discount department stores while working at the White house. He was sentenced to two years of supervised probation and fined $500.
• Philip Cooney, a former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist who became chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, acknowledged in congressional testimony earlier this year that he changed three government reports to eliminate or downplay links between greenhouse gases and global warming. He left in 2005 to work for Exxon Mobil Corp.
• Darleen Druyun, a former Air Force procurement officer, served nine months in prison in 2005 for violating federal conflict-of-interest rules in a deal to lease Boeing refueling tankers for $23 billion, despite Pentagon studies showing the tankers were unnecessary. After making the deal, she quit the government and joined Boeing.
_Eric Keroack, Bush's choice to oversee the federal family planning program, resigned from the post suddenly last month after the Massachusetts Medicaid office launched an investigation into his private practice. He had been medical director of an organization that opposes premarital sex and contraception.
• Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, attended a luncheon at the agency earlier this year with other top GSA political appointees at which Scott Jennings, a top Rove aide, gave a PowerPoint demonstration on how to help Republican candidates in 2008. A congressional committee is investigating whether the remarks violated a federal law that restricts executive-branch employees from using their positions for political purposes.
• Robert W. Cobb, NASA's inspector general is under investigation on charges of ignoring safety violations in the space program. An internal administration review said he routinely tipped off department officials to internal investigations and quashed a report related to the Columbia shuttle explosion to avoid embarrassing the agency. He remains on the job. Only Bush can fire him.
• Julie MacDonald, who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service but has no academic background in biology, overrode recommendations of agency scientists about how to protect endangered species and improperly leaked internal information to private groups, the Interior Department inspector general said.
She felt like she was hit in the gut
She claims her name was carelessly and recklessly abused by the administration
She was in fact a victim.
Valerie Plame Wilson was a loyal American who risked her life in service as part of the CIA. She was an American spy. Today, she appeared for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to warn Congress on exactly how dangerous and two-faced this administration is. So dangerous they would throw any American to the wolves who disagrees with them...or is close to anyone to disagrees with them.
Today's testimony from Plame Wilson was heartwrenching. Here's a woman who had one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, and she wasn't doing it for the fame, for the glory, but for her country. She was a loving wife, mother of two young children and because her husband dared speak to power, she, a wife and mother, was thrown to the wolves.
This case will always to be me the textbook reason this administration has been a disgrace. If this is how they treat American heroes, how can they support the troops? How can they care about any other American? If they would throw a CIA agent to the wolves, any one of us would be foresaken for our beliefs.
Meanwhile, it seems the Wilson are getting the last laugh. The couple is set to move to New Mexico and start a new life...and Joe Wilson has been named as a potential candidate for Congress in New Mexico in the future. Valerie has a book coming out this year; tentatively titled "Fair Game," and will be followed by a movie. (Richard Gere and Sharon Stone have been rumored to star as the Wilsons.)
The administration, meanwhile, is in shambles, with low approval rating, and a Congress controlled by the Democrats tying the hands of the out-of-control Commander-in-Chief.
