A Guilty Byproduct of a Nonexistent Crime

For nearly a decade, I have delivered a stern lecture to anyone whining about the 1990s quest to determine whether President Bill Clinton and his wife were criminals.

Impeachment "was all about the sex," their protectors would cry - and still do. In the Whitewater matter, questions lingered for years over whether James and Susan McDougal received favorable regulatory treatment in a business deal with the Clintons in Arkansas.

"So what?" came the reply from those willing to forgive in advance when their heroes were questioned.

Here's the "so what." As I've said for all of the intervening years, lying matters. Even if one was not impressed by the gravity of the Paula Jones lawsuit or an Arkansas land deal, good citizenship requires us to care when people lie to investigating authorities, even if it means facing some unpleasantness about those we admire.

Today, that responsibility falls on me.

From the State Department to the Pentagon to the Bush White House, Irve Lewis "Scooter" Libby's track record glows with more than 20 years of distinguished service to our country. His list of admirers is long, peopled with almost everyone who has made his professional acquaintance.

But the question before a jury was not about his résumé or quality as a human being. The question was: Did Scooter Libby lie to a federal grand jury and others investigating the disclosure of a CIA employee's identity?

Yes, the jury said, on four of five counts. I am thus obliged to absorb this unpleasant news, just as I have called on others to do when the wheels of justice gored an ox or two of theirs.

So consider it absorbed. But that doesn't mean I don't have questions.

First, why did the Department of Justice feel compelled to create an office of special counsel to address this matter in the first place? The questions of Mr. Clinton's potential guilt in the Paula Jones and Whitewater matters would have required trials to achieve the best and most thorough answers. In the Valerie Plame case, all anyone needed was a calendar and a CIA manual.

Perusal of both would yield the answer arrived at here in the lowly columnist class long ago - that Ms. Plame, wife of avowed Bush-hater Joe Wilson, was in no way subject to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 or the Espionage Act.

At the time of the initial leak - which we now know did not even come from the White House, but from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage - she had been back in the U.S. longer than the five years established by law for covert agent protection. There is no proof of the other basis that would compel secrecy, that the CIA wished for her identity to be kept secret at the time.

A jury just spent 10 days arguing about whether a man who gave untrue answers about this matter did so from faulty memory or a desire to deceive. Such questions arise with some regularity in our governmental history.

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald discounted the notion of making this one of the countless cases that does not rise to the level of prosecution. "None of us on the team could walk away," he told a post-verdict news conference, describing his duty to pursue the smallest minutiae in any matter of lying to a federal grand jury.

This is not an unreasonable standard for him to hold. But I would also ask if we will ever see such diligence applied with some consistency. From Filegate to Travelgate to the mysterious gone-yesterday-here-today Rose Law Firm records, where was the desire to look with similar official fervor into the question of whether Mr. Clinton and his wife were crooks?

That question is left to historians and political partisans. But, hey, at least we got to the bottom of whether a decent man fibbed or forgot as the feds explored a nonexistent crime.

I know I'll sleep better now.