Who is Scooter Libby? The Guy behind Dick Cheney

Who is Scooter Libby?
The Guy Behind the Guy Behind the Guy
by John Lyman - Center for American Progress
July 8, 2004

When historians finally lift the curtain on the Bush administration, they will discover that Irv Lewis "Scooter" Libby was one of the most important men pulling the levers. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has been center stage for every one of the administration's national security scandals - the Iraq intelligence debacle, secret meetings about Halliburton contracts in Iraq, and the leaking of a CIA's agent's identity to the press - and doubtless others we have not heard of yet.

Such a role is not unusual for Libby, who has more titles in the Bush White House than can fit on a business card. Essentially Libby is Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney - an odd combination of H.R Haldeman and Harry Hopkins, seemingly managing every detail of the vice president's professional life.

For the past three years, that has meant scooting from scandal to scandal.

It was Libby - along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and a handful of other top aides at the Pentagon and White House - who convinced the President that we should go to war in Iraq. It was Libby who pushed Cheney to publicly argue that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and 9/11.

It was also Libby who pleaded and prodded for Secretary of State Colin Powell to include specious reports about an alleged meeting between 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in his February 2003 speech to the United Nations. Libby and his staff reportedly badgered Powell's speechwriters for weeks, culminating in a meeting where Libby presented information that, according to those who were there, was over the top and too aggressive.

The so-called evidence unraveled when intelligence analysts examined it later. As one official told the Washington Post, "After one day of hearing screams about who put this together. . . we essentially threw it out." Undeterred, Libby continued to try to press his agenda - going so far as calling and demanding Powell's staff include new information late in the evening the night before the secretary was scheduled to give his speech.

A junior member of "The Vulcans" - the name Bush's core national security team of Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz et al. have come up with for themselves - Libby is an aging star and an ideological soulmate of the group. Still known to friends and colleagues as Scooter (his father watched him crawling across his crib as a baby one day and exclaimed "He's a Scooter") he first came in contact with the group as an undergraduate at Yale when he took a political science class from Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense.

From Yale, Libby went on to Columbia Law School and then settled down to practice law in Philadelphia. His most famous client was Marc Rich, the fugitive financier and alleged tax evader who was pardoned by President Clinton during the last days of his administration. Clinton's pardon, which at the time drew heavy criticism from Republicans, was largely the result of legal arguments Libby had been making for 15 years.

Libby's Washington career began when Wolfowitz called his former student and asked him to give up his law practice to go to work in the Reagan administration. Libby immediately jumped at the opportunity and went to work in the state department. Later, under the first George Bush, he moved to the defense department.

It was there that he wrote a sweeping new Defense Planning Guidance document that attempted to reorient U.S. global military policy. The paper - highly praised by neocons at the time - called for the United States to build up its military capabilities to the point where no other country could ever rival them. Cheney, who was then Secretary of Defense, liked the document so much that he ordered parts of the usually secret plan declassified and made them public. The Planning Guidance document went a long way toward endearing Libby to Cheney.

Today what touches Cheney reaches Libby and vice-versa. Libby's role in the awarding of at least one multi-million dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton is a case in point.

For months, the vice president's office denied that it played any role in the selection of the company once headed by Cheney to repair Iraq's oil fields. But, as the Washington Post recently reported, it turns out that Libby had been briefed by Pentagon officials before the contract was awarded - raising questions of impropriety at best, and corruption at worst. The man best able to answer the questions about what went on, according to the Post, is none other than Libby.

There is speculation that Libby has already faced questioning by a special prosecutor in what may turn out to be the most damaging Bush scandal - the White House's leaking of a CIA operative's name. The operative - the wife of Joe Wilson, a former ambassador and Bush administration critic - was outed to journalists in an attempt to intimidate her husband, who had offered proof that the President was inflating evidence about Iraq search for nuclear materials.

Numerous press reports hold that Libby was closely involved in the incident (either as the leaker or someone who knew about and authorized the leak). And the New York Times has revealed that Cheney was specifically asked about Libby when prosecutors grilled him. A grand jury is currently investigating the case, which could carry a prison sentence of 10 years.

Libby may eventually be cleared in the CIA leak probe. But the fact that he is in the midst of investigations surrounding it surprises no one. What should cause real alarm is another rumor circulating in the West Wing: that Libby will replace national security adviser Condoleezza Rice should George Bush win a second term.