United States President George Bush suffered a fresh setback on Tuesday when a top White House aide, Lewis ”Scooter” Libby, was found guilty of perjury in relation to events leading up to the invasion of Iraq.
Bush, whose polling rates are already the worst of his six years in office as a result of Iraq, watched the verdict on television in the Oval office. A White House spokesperson, Dana Perino, said the president ”respected the jury’s verdict” and that he was ”saddened for Scooter Libby and his family”.
Libby, who resigned from office when indicted in 2005, will be sentenced on June 5 when he could face 25 years in jail. He is to appeal and that process could be drawn out until just before Bush leaves office in January 2009, at which time he could pardon him.
After two weeks of deliberation, the jury found Libby guilty of four of five charges of lying to the FBI and obstructing justice.
The FBI had been investigating a leak by the Bush administration of the identity of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, who subsequently lost her job. The leaking appeared to be an act of revenge by the White House against her husband, Joe Wilson, a former ambassador who challenged Bush’s case for invading Iraq.
Libby had been for four years chief of staff to Dick Cheney, the Vice-President. As a leading member of the neoconservatives, he and his hawkish boss were among those driving the Iraq policy. Cheney, who had described Libby as a man of integrity, refused to comment on the verdict.
The Democratic party, which is trying to use congressional powers to rein in Bush in Iraq, welcomed the verdict. The speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said: ”The testimony unmistakably revealed — at the highest levels of the Bush administration — a callous disregard in handling sensitive national security information and a disposition to smear critics of the war in Iraq.”
During the trial, in which Libby and Cheney had been expected to appear on the stand but did not on the advice of the defence team, the former chief of staff was portrayed as suffering from a memory lapse when giving evidence to the FBI.
Theodore Wells, who led the defence team, said: ”We have every confidence Mr Libby ultimately will be vindicated.” – Guardian Unlimited Â