Granting pardons can cause leaders grief - Yahoo! News

Granting pardons can cause leaders grief - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON - Richard Nixon. Mark Felt. Caspar Weinberger. Marc Rich. Is President Bush willing to risk — on behalf of ex-White House aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby — the kind of political grief that pardons for those four men brought the presidents who granted them? Nixon resigned the presidency over the Watergate scandal. Felt was the FBI man convicted of ordering illegal break-ins. Weinberger was the defense secretary charged in the Iran-Contra scandal. Rich was a fugitive financier. All received presidential pardons processed outside normal channels. As in those cases, Bush would have to bypass the regular clemency process to pardon Libby for the four felonies he was convicted of on Tuesday. Such pardons historically have gotten presidents into political trouble. A number of conservative politicians, bloggers and commentators, including National Review and Wall Street Journal editorial writers, want Libby pardoned — preferably now. Top Democrats have demanded that Bush pledge not to pardon Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. William Jeffress, one of Libby's lawyers, said, 'I believed a pardon for Scooter was appropriate last summer' when it came out that a State Department official, not Libby, was the initial source for a newspaper column disclosing the classified CIA job of Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson."