Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) slow to respond to Libby commutation.

Joe Biden: Americans should “flood the White House with phone calls.”

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)’s got no comment on Libby commutation.

SurveyUSA has instant numbers out on public reactions to the commutation.

Via Byron York at the Corner, Patrick Fitzgerald’s statement …

We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.

We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as “excessive.” The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.

Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.

Siegelman lawyers to Bush: We’ll take the Scooter treatment, please.

Hillary releases her statement on Libby …

“Today’s decision is yet another example that this Administration simply considers itself above the law. This case arose from the Administration’s politicization of national security intelligence and its efforts to punish those who spoke out against its policies. Four years into the Iraq war, Americans are still living with the consequences of this White House’s efforts to quell dissent. This commutation sends the clear signal that in this Administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.”

Here at TPM we’re particularly interested to see Republican responses to the Libby commutation. If you’re watching cable TV this evening and you see reactions from the right, particularly from elected officials, shoot us an email with time, channel and who gave the statement. We’ll get the clip and put together a montage of all the choicest reactions.

TPM Reader PT notes what many others have also flagged …

I havent seen this noted but i think the reason for the commutation is that a pardon would mean that Libby was no longer exposed to criminal sanctions and thus had no Fifth Amendment privilege. As it stands he has a fine and probation at stake during the pendency of the appeal which inulates him ( and Bush and Cheney) from havaing to answer questions before Congress.

I hate to rain on the all Libby all the time parade, but there’s something else you should know about, something which might be no less important.

In various posts over the last couple years I’ve pointed to the as-yet-too-little-investigated Pentagon dimension of the Duke Cunningham scandal. In brief, the Cunningham case appears to tie directly to efforts by top ranking Pentagon appointees, around and including Stephen Cambone, to set up their own domestic surveillance and spying operations. Key contracts for the CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity) program went to Cunningham’s bribers. And there is good reason to believe that politicals at the DOD choose to ignore Duke’s crimes in exchange for help running their programs outside of the safeguards in place in the rest of the intelligence community, and quite likely well outside the bounds of American law. In short, a big part of the scam may have been that Duke and his crooked pals got big bucks in exchange for helping Bush-appointees at the DOD spy on American citizens.

Now, one of these DOD programs was something called TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice), a program to collect information on Americans involved in anti-war protests. This evening I saw this post from Emptywheel which discusses the recently release Pentagon IG report on the program (released June 27th).

There’s quite a lot of interest contained in the report. But emptywheel immediately fixes on the key finding, or rather impediment to findings. In the report’s words, “all TALON reports were deleted from their database in June 2006 with no archives.”

In other words, right about the time the Cunningham prosecutors started seriously looking into this dimension of the case, and around the time information was starting to come out about the DOD’s domestic ‘surveillance’ operations, somehow the entire record of the TALON program, every report that had been collected, was scrubbed.