Word: seniorities
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...over a month Cheney had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon the Vice President's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Libby had been convicted nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity by senior White House officials. The Libby pardon, aides reported, had become something of a crusade for Cheney, who seemed prepared to push his nine-year-old relationship with Bush to the breaking point - and perhaps past it - over the fate of his former aide. "We don't want to leave anyone...
...against the Vice President. Fielding reviewed the Libby case before the appellate verdict came down and recommended against a presidential pardon. Cheney's longtime aide hadn't met the criteria: accepting responsibility for the crime, doing time and demonstrating remorse. "Pardons tend to be for the repentant," says a senior Administration official familiar with the 2007 pardon review, "not for those who think the system was politicized or they were unfairly targeted...
...Pardon Book The final days of the Bush White House were dominated by worries about the gasping economy, farewell interviews by senior officials and plenty of stories about Bush's dismal approval ratings as he prepared to leave town. But the "elephant in the room," as an adviser puts it, was the still unresolved case of Libby. Many in the West Wing feared that the matter threatened to rend Bush and Cheney's relationship because of the intensity of Cheney's campaign for a full and final pardon...
...there was a darker possibility. As a former Bush senior aide explains, "I'm sure the President and [chief of staff] Josh [Bolten] and Fred had a concern that somewhere, deep in there, there was a cover-up." It had been an article of faith among Cheney's critics that the Vice President wanted a pardon for Libby because Libby had taken the fall for him in the Fitzgerald probe. In his grand-jury testimony reviewed by TIME, Libby denied three times that Cheney had directed him to leak Plame's CIA identity in mid-2003. Though his recollection...
...blinded by his personal loyalty to Scooter," a White House aide says. Cheney had pressed the issue as far as he could but finally conceded. "The Vice President knew there was a line out there that he was getting very close to but couldn't cross," says a former senior official. "The President knew that he needed to help make sure that Cheney didn't cross that line either...