Valerie Plame, the former CIA operative at the center of the case against a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, said Friday morning that President Donald Trump’s impending decision to pardon the aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was about no one but Donald Trump.
“This is definitely not about me. It’s absolutely not about Scooter Libby. This is about Donald Trump and his future,” she said Friday appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “What he’s putting out there is the idea that you can pardon people for serious crimes against national security. I think he has an audience of three, perhaps more. That would be Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner.”
She said the “message” being sent is “you can commit perjury and I will pardon you if it protects me and I deem that you are loyal to me.”
The White House announced Friday afternoon that Trump had pardoned Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff who was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI in 2007. The conviction stemmed from a probe into the leak of the identity of Plame, who had been working for the CIA as an undercover agent overseas. Plame was married to Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador and a critic of the George W. Bush administration’s case for the war in Iraq. Libby was never charged with leaking Plame’s name to the press.
Plame drew parallels between Libby’s case and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian meddling in the 2016 election, claiming Trump was attempting to send a message to Flynn and Manafort about his pardoning power as president.
Watch a clip of the interview below:
Ms. Plame is absolutely right, it’s all a message to Manafort, Flynn and Cohen telling them that he will pardon them no matter what.
She still knows how to correctly analyze situations.
What Cheney and Scooter did to her and the IC still pisses me off. A little payback for this latest affront to national security would be just fine.
Yes, and I’m glad she’s weighing in so rationally so quickly after the act. I don’t know how much play this will receive on Fox News, of course, but for consumers of relatively unbiased information it will be good to hear that Scooter Libby did in fact commit a serious f%*^ing crime. And it’s not like there’s real doubt he did it.
She’s right, but I kind of wonder why the pardon wasn’t announced this evening, in the Friday night news hole. It would have been just as strong a message to Manafort and company if it was announced later.
It could be an effort to distract from the Cohen and Russia stuff, but I don’t know. We also have a briefing on Syria coming up, which will also keep the news occupied. I fear we’ll get something bigger announced this evening, like Rosenstein being fired.