Last week, the judge presiding over Scooter Libby’s case said he was confused: the president’s commutation of Libby’s sentence had eliminated the jail time, but left in place the two-year period of supervised release that was to follow incarceration. By law, supervised release follows a prison sentence .It wasn’t immediately clear how to deal with that, so the judge asked the two parties to weigh in on how they thought this should be resolved. There have been whispers that Libby might not even have to serve his two years of probation as a result of the discrepancy.
Today, White House counsel Fred Fielding wrote Patrick Fitzgerald in an effort to clear this up. When the president said “supervised release,” he meant it, no matter if that clashes with the law. The president’s commutation power would “unmistakably govern,” Fielding wrote. You can read the letter here.