Libby insisted he simply remembered events differ- ently from other witnesses. Libby had been convicted of lying to federal investigators about whether he had divulged to journalists the name of a CIA officer married to a critic of the vice president. You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that's a crime.' 'But if I were on that jury, I would probably have agreed with them.

I wasn't there,' Burck was saying to Bush, tempering his 'he did it' judgment just a bit. Now they were in the Oval Office to report back that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel who had also served in the same role for Ronald Reagan, and William Burck, his deputy who had been a federal prosecutor in New York, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby's lawyers had raised. To help make a decision, Bush personally asked White House lawyers to reexamine the case to see if a pardon was justified. Yet how could he tell Cheney no? How could he reject his partner of two terms on the one thing Cheney cared about most? For a man who valued loyalty above almost all else, it cut against the grain. The whole pardon process seemed corrupted to him, and now here was the ultimate insider seeking a special favor. He had long bristled at the notion of people trading on connections to win executive clemency. He brought it up again and again, to the point that the president did not want to talk with him about it anymore.īush's gut told him no pardon, and he usually followed his gut. Lewis Libby, who was known to all as Scooter and had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a case that had its roots in the origins of the Iraq War.

For two months, Dick Cheney had been lobbying for a pardon for his former chief of staff, I. His vice president, the man who had been at his side through every crisis for eight tumultuous years, was pressing him as never before.

The nation's forty-third president had just days left in office, and the Decider, as he had memorably dubbed himself, was struggling with one final decision. 'Yeah,' the lawyer said, 'I think he did it.' Bush was sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum, staring, and listening-in fact listening longer than usual.

Days of fire by peter baker