Bush and Scooter Libby

The former White House aide deserves a full pardon.

Rarely can Presidents improve their legacy in an Administration's twilight days. But President Bush now has that opportunity, by undoing a measure of the injustice inflicted on I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

As the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who suffered in a fiasco made worse by the White House, Mr. Libby deserves a full Presidential pardon. Mr. Bush commuted Mr. Libby's sentence in 2007, an action that kept him out of jail. But that doesn't expunge his conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice. As a felon, Mr. Libby is barred by law from voting or practicing law, his occupation for most of his working life. The half-measure reflected poorly on the President, whose commutation statement treated Mr. Libby at a chilly arm's length.

That was especially ungracious given that Mr. Bush's failure to manage his Administration's disputes on Iraq was a root cause of Mr. Libby's troubles. Many in his Administration failed to behave honorably, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Mr. Hadley refused even to meet with Mr. Libby's lawyers, though Mr. Hadley's willingness to disavow the famous 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address that Joe Wilson challenged kicked off the "scandal" hunt.

Mr. Wilson's 2003 op-ed claiming that "the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat" was the supposed animus for the Administration's leak of the identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. As the leaking whodunit became a media frenzy and others ducked for cover, Mr. Libby was nearly alone in defending the Administration for being honest (if wrong) about prewar intelligence, an act that landed him in the net of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Mr. Libby didn't leak Ms. Plame's name to journalist Robert Novak; Mr. Armitage did that deed, though neither he nor his close friend, Mr. Powell, bothered to tell Mr. Bush or the world. Based on the trial record and our own long experience with Mr. Libby, we also don't think Mr. Libby lied. As Mr. Fitzgerald's prosecution circled back again and again, Mr. Libby's defense that his memory faltered in recalling the details of long ago conversations is entirely plausible for a busy White House aide.

The case against him was based on conflicting accounts of a single conversation Mr. Libby had in July 2003 with each of three journalists. The judge threw out the count concerning his talk with Judith Miller, and the jury found him not guilty on the count involving Matthew Cooper. His conviction on four other counts comes down essentially to a dispute over Mr. Libby's claim that Tim Russert had told him about Ms. Plame. Russert, the NBC journalist who has since died, initially told the FBI it was possible he told Mr. Libby, but by the time of the trial Russert said he was sure he had not done so. Neither man had notes from their call, and it is possible that Russert's memory was as faulty as Mr. Libby's.

Prosecutors claimed Mr. Libby was motivated to lie about what he'd heard from Russert on July 11 to protect himself against what he told Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper a day later. But if Mr. Libby didn't lie about those conversations, as the case proved, his motive to lie about Russert vanishes. The trial also showed that Mr. Libby had spoken that same week with journalists Robert Novak and Bob Woodward, both of whom were asking questions about Ms. Plame and could have also become confused with Russert in Mr. Libby's recollections.

Mr. Libby's lawyers attempted to call an expert on memory as a witness at the trial, but the judge refused on the remarkable grounds that everyone knows about memory. The trial itself took place in early 2007 amid the passions of Mr. Bush's decision to "surge" troops in Iraq, and there were protests on the Washington Mall. The judgment by a Washington, D.C. jury was more a verdict on the Bush Administration than it was about the confusing facts of Mr. Libby's alleged deceit. The Plame affair was a proxy for the larger political dispute over Iraq, and Mr. Libby became the Beltway sacrifice. By trumpeting his guilt, critics were able to impugn Mr. Bush's policies by insisting the President had "lied us into war."

The pardon power is granted to the President by Article II of the Constitution -- and is not to be taken lightly. At its best, the power should be used not for political favors but to correct injustice in cases where the courts have erred. The most important pardons have often been controversial, from Andrew Johnson's pardons of Confederate soldiers after the Civil War to President Ford's pardon of President Nixon. With perspective, they have helped to close the book on political mistakes, struggles and mismanagement, returning history's judgment from minor actors to the President.

The Bush Administration is mythologized as one in which loyalty is a defining virtue, especially on the part of the President himself. In this dark episode, an honest man became the fall guy in a larger political war over the war. Mr. Libby deserved better -- and Mr. Bush owes it to Mr. Libby, and to future occupants of the White House, to give him a full pardon.