No Bail For Libby
He’ll have to go to jail, barring another appeal possibly to the Supreme Court. Though I doubt SCOTUS is going to weigh in on something like a bail ruling.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A federal appeals court Monday rejected former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s request to remain free on appeal after his March conviction on federal charges stemming from the leak of a CIA agent’s identity.
Libby, once Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, faces a 30-month prison term after being convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal agents probing the 2003 exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband had become a critic of the war in Iraq.
A three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals found Libby has not raised a question for judges “that is ‘close’ or that ‘could very well be decided the other way’” — the standard for remaining free on appeal.
Barring further appeals, Libby’s term will start when the U.S. Bureau of Prisons decides where he will serve his time and sets a date for him to surrender. But his lawyers may appeal Monday’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rarely intervenes in these kinds of cases.
I’m still baffled as to why Libby can’t be free on bail. He’s a public figure and obviously no flight risk, and the crime he’s been convicted of is rather unserious in nature (he forgot what he’d said to a reporter a year previous to his testimony for crying out loud!).
But then, I’m not sure why he was convicted in the first place. Other than the fact that Patrick Fitzgerald needed something to show for spending years and tens of millions of dollars on investigating this non-scandal.
