Tag: pardon

President Donald Trump on Friday pardoned former Vice President Dick Cheney’s onetime Chief of Staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted in 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. President George W. Bush had already been accused of showing favoritism to someone within his administration when he commuted Libby’s sentence, which saved Libby from serving two-and-a-half-years in jail. But pardons go further, restoring some rights that are usually revoked for those with criminal convictions as well as reducing the stigma that comes with the offense. That’s what Cheney wanted for his former aide. But Bush thought Libby didn’t deserve a pardon, and Cheney never forgave him. Here’s why, as TIME explained in its Aug. 3, 2009, cover story on the feud: Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Hours before they were to leave office after eight troubled years, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had one final and painful piece of business to conclude. Libby had been convicted nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity by senior White House officials. A top adviser to Bush says he had never seen the Vice President focused so single-mindedly on anything over two terms. It reveals how one question–whether to grant a presidential pardon to a top vice-presidential aide–strained the bonds between Bush and his deputy and closest counselor. As a Cheney confidant puts it, the Vice President believed he and the President could claim the war on terrorism as his greatest legacy only if they defended at all costs the men and women who fought in the trenches.

The Story: The streets of Lima, Peru's capital, were filled on December 24 with protestors angered by what they believed was a pay-off on a...

“Regarding the Arpaio pardon, I would have preferred that the President honor the judicial process and let it take its course,” Jeff Flake on Twitter. Well, this very judicial process also convicted a Cuban terrorist/spy named Gerardo Hernandez for –among other crimes--conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens. In fact, these convictions were upheld all the way to the Supreme Court. Yet Sen. Jeff Flake was a gleeful accessory to Obama’s pardon (by any other name) of this communist spy/murderer/terrorist and his release back to Cuba as a conquering hero. You see, amigos: among Castro’s demands for the privilege of being allowed to inflict brain damage, permanent hearing loss, and lord knows what else on U.S. diplomats while sheltering the FBI’s most-wanted cop-killers and while being deluged with $BILLIONS upon $BILLIONS of U.S. dollars by Obama--among the snickering Castro’s demands for enjoying this financial and propaganda windfall from Obama was Obama’s immediate release of his KGB-trained spy/terrorist/murderer Gerardo Hernandez—“and plenty pronto!” Needless to add, Obama granted every one of Castro’s demands with a smile, bow, and curtsy-- but frantically tried to keep his pathetic capitulations to Castro from the American people. And needless to add, the FAKE NEWS media did everything in their power to conceal his miserable grovelings to Castro from the American people. In February 1996, Castro agent Gerardo Hernandez fulfilled his spy-mission by passing the flight plan to Castro for one of the Brothers’ humanitarian flights. MiGs against Cessnas, cannons and rockets against flowers. An especially repulsive aspect of Obama’s appeasement of Castro is that for months prior to the release of the Castroite murderer, the families of the Americans he murdered were repeatedly assured by Obama’s State Dept. with their bald-faced lies and relentless treachery against U.S. citizens.