Dick Cheney while still v.p.

Perhaps one of the more surprising things at the end of the Bush era was that the president did not offer pardons to more high-profile people, particular those like Scooter Libby. Obviously, the grief President Clinton got for pardoning financier Marc Rich must have had some impact on his decision to pass on many pardons.

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Former vice president Richard B. Cheney
said yesterday that he strongly disagreed with President Bush’s decision not to pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, saying his former chief of staff had been left “hanging in the wind.”

“I think he’s an innocent man who deserves a pardon,” Cheney said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” in what the cable news program billed as his first television interview since leaving office in January.

Libby, Cheney’s top adviser, was the only Bush administration official to face criminal charges in the case surrounding the exposure of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA operative in 2003.

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