In the final days of his presidency, George W. Bush sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum and staring into the distance as two White House lawyers briefed him on the possible last-minute pardon of I. Lewis Libby.
"Do you think he did it?" Bush asked.
"Yeah," one of the lawyers said. "I think he did it."
In March 2007, Libby, who had served as Dick Cheney's chief of staff, was convicted of lying to federal officials who were investigating the leak of the identity of a C.I.A. officer. For the past two months Cheney had been pushing the president to grant Libby a full pardon before they left office. He would not let it go. Cheney brought it up again and again, first before Thanksgiving, then again around Christmas and finally throughout January 2009 as they prepared for the transition to the incoming Obama administration. His lobbying was so intense that the president made clear to his aides that he did not want to talk with Cheney about it anymore.
Troubled by the decision hanging over him, Bush had asked the White House lawyers to re-examine the case to see if a pardon was justified. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and his deputy, William Burck, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby's lawyers had raised in his defense. Their conclusion was that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty.
"If I were on that jury," Burck told Bush, "I would probably have agreed with them. You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that's a crime."
The case had its origins in the politically fraught summer of 2003, when American troops had just invaded Iraq but were unable to find the unconventional weapons they had been told were there. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, suggested that the White House ignored contrary evidence about Iraq's nuclear program in the months before the invasion, a charge Cheney would deny. When the news media reported that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A., the F.B.I. opened an investigation into whether her identity was illegally divulged.
Libby testified that he first learned Valerie Plame Wilson was a C.I.A. official from Tim Russert, the NBC journalist. If true, this would mean he did not disclose secret information he learned as Cheney's chief of staff — which would undercut the common theory that the leak came from Cheney's office and that Cheney was trying to take retribution against Wilson by blowing his wife's cover. Libby's story clashed not just with Russert's version, but also with those of eight other people, including fellow administration officials, who testified that they talked with Libby about Wilson before his conversation with Russert. When Russert disputed Libby's depiction of events, Libby said simply that he must have misremembered what had transpired, hardly an indictable offense.
"All right," the president said when the lawyers concluded their assessment. "So why do you think he did it? Do you think he was protecting the vice president?"
"I don't think he was protecting the vice president," Burck said.
Burck figured that Libby assumed his account would never be contradicted, because prosecutors could not force reporters to violate vows of confidentiality to their sources. "I think also that Libby was concerned," Burck said. "Because he took to heart what you said back then: that you would fire anybody that you knew was involved in this. I just think he didn't think it was worth falling on the sword."
Bush did not seem convinced. "I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney," the president said. If that was the case, then Cheney was seeking forgiveness for the man who had sacrificed himself on his behalf.
"Now I am going to have to have the talk with the vice president," Bush said. That was the sort of unpleasant business that for eight years he had left to Cheney. It was the vice president who delivered the bad news, for instance, to Paul O'Neill and Donald Rumsfeld when they were fired.
Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff, was also in the room, and he volunteered to handle it.
"Nah, nah," Bush said. "I can do it." But as several people close to him would later attest, the president was dreading it.
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