Isikoff also added an interesting detail I hadn't heard before: Bush asked White House Counsel Fred Fielding to help determine whether Libby's jury made the right call. Far from respecting the verdict, as the White House has been emphasizing all week, the president hoped to find that the jurors came to an unreasonable conclusion, which in turn would make it easier for Bush to intervene.
Fielding came up empty. As Isikoff explained it, he "reluctantly concluded that the jury had reached a reasonable verdict: the evidence was strong that Libby testified falsely about his role in the leak."
In other words, the president learned just how guilty Libby really was, but commuted the sentence anyway because he "hated the idea that a loyal aide would serve time."(emphases added)
So, a noted attorney came to the conclusion that the jurors' decision was correct. Marshall, who I am assuming is not an attorney, spent a couple hours looking things over, and came to the opposite conclusion. As to weighing various sources and their reliability, with whom should I go here . . .
UPDATE: With a tip of the hat to Digby for the link we have this piece by Hendrick Hertzberg which includes the following:
Some of the Post’s findings have been foreshadowed elsewhere, notably in Jane Mayer’s dispatches in this magazine. (See, especially, Letter from Washington, “The Hidden Power,” July 3, 2006.) But many of the details and incidents that Gellman and Becker document are as new as they are appalling. More important, the pattern that emerges from the accumulated weight of the reporting is, as the lawyers say, dispositive. Given the ontological authority that the Post shares only with the New York Times, it is now, so to speak, official: for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams called “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,” has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable “war on terror.”
More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of “cruel,” “inhuman,” and “degrading” treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: “a no-brainer for me”), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.
While this is more an indictment than a conviction (there is no evidence presented in Hertzberg's piece, merely assertions; for Marshall's sake, we might consider giving evidence for these assertions) it should be clear that the notion that the Bush Administration is perhaps the most criminally corrupt and incompetent bunch ever to fail miserably at governing our country is not the invention of low-level bloggers such as myself, or the "liberal press" or any other conspiratorial group struck with some psychological disorder known as BSD. Rather, it is the reasonable conclusion of six and a half years of witnessing these clowns in action. It just is.
