Conyers to Bush: Follow Clinton and waive executive privilege for Libby hearing Michael Roston

Published: Monday July 9, 2007 Print This Email This Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) released a letter on Monday that he wrote last week asking President George W. Bush to waive his invocation of executive privilege for a Wednesday hearing on the commuting of former top White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's jail sentence. Conyers asked Bush to follow in the footsteps of Presidents Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford relating to similar congressional probes. "When President Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich stirred its own controversy back in 2001, former President Clinton took the forthright step of waiving Executive Privilege and permitting some of his closest aides to testify about the facts of the matter," he said in the July 6 letter to the White House. He added, "It is in this spirit that I call on you too to waive Executive Privilege and provide the relevant documents and testimony of any relevant aides regarding the decision to commute Mr. Libby's sentence. Given that President Ford testified before our committee in 1974 about his pardon of President Nixon, there is ample precedent for you taking such a step." Conyers announced last week that he was calling a hearing on the use of the clemency authority granted in the Constitution to Presidents. The hearing was prompted by Bush's effective cancellation of the jail sentence of Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was found guilty of perjury, obstruction justice, and making false statements in the federal investigation of the outing of former covert CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson. In a July 3 press conference, Tony Snow appeared to invoke executive privilege in refusing to explain how the White House arrived at its decision to commute Libby's sentence. "[T]here's a very important debate going on in Washington about the importance of maintaining the sanctity of deliberations within a White House," Snow said. "The President spent weeks and weeks consulting with senior members of this White House about the proper way to proceed, and they looked at a whole lot of options, and they spent a lot of time talking through the options and doing some very detailed legal analysis....I'm not going to characterize beyond that." A particular question from Conyers has been whether or not the Vice President was involved in the deliberations of whether his former top aide would spend time in jail. Snow failed to give a definitive answer as to whether or not Cheney had recused himself from the process, and fell back on executive privilege in answering the question when it was brought up by the press. "We'd never...talk about internal deliberations," he said. "Nice try. This is exactly what we're talking about right now before the House and Senate, and we're not going to characterize specifically any kind of advice or plea that somebody may make." Conyers's committee will take up the subject in a hearing at noon on Wednesday. The witness list for the hearing is not yet known.



