From Newsweek, an interesting article that tends to lead one to believe that Bush won't pardon Libby:

    Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff does not qualify to even be considered for a presidential pardon under Justice Department guidelines.

    From the day he took office, Bush seems to have followed those guidelines religiously. He's taken an exceedingly stingy approach to pardons, granting only 113 in six years, mostly for relatively minor fraud, embezzlement and drug cases dating back more than two decades. Bush’s pardons are “fewer than any president in 100 years,” according to Margaret Love, former pardon attorney at the Justice Department.

    Following the furor over President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich (among others), Bush made it clear he wasn’t interested in granting many pardons. “We were basically told [by then White House counsel and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales] that there weren’t going to be pardons—or if there were, there would be very few,” recalls one former White House lawyer who asked not to be identified talking about internal matters.

    The president has since indicated he intended to go by the book in granting what few pardons he’d hand out—considering only requests that had first been reviewed by the Justice Department under a series of publicly available guidelines.

    Those regulations, which are discussed on the Justice Department Web site at www.usdoj.gov/pardon, would seem to make a Libby pardon a nonstarter in George W. Bush’s White House. They “require a petitioner to wait a period of at least five years after conviction or release from confinement (whichever is later) before filing a pardon application,” according to the Justice Web site.

    Of course, there is nothing that requires Bush to follow these guidelines in reviewing a pardon for Libby (whose lawyer, Ted Wells, stated on the courthouse steps Tuesday that he intended to push for a retrial, adding that he has “every confidence that Mr. Libby will be vindicated.”)

    Still, Bush himself publicly reaffirmed his determination to stick to the Justice pardon guidelines as recently as last month.

    None of this means that, in the last days of his presidency, Bush won’t feel differently about Libby (who ironically once worked as a lawyer for Marc Rich in an earlier effort to win him a pardon). Libby's supporters will argue forcefully that he was unjustly prosecuted and others, like former deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage (who first leaked Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity to columnist Robert Novak) were more culpable and should have been charged. Cheney—who once praised Libby as “one of the most capable and talented individuals I have ever known”—may well make a personal plea to the president.

    But for now, one intriguing clue as to White House thinking came from a well-known Washington lobbyist and White House ally who was steering reporters away from the pardon idea this week. “The guidance I get is Libby doesn’t qualify under the guidelines,” the lobbyist, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters, told a reporter in a TV “green room” this week. The lobbyist wouldn’t say who provided the guidance. But the fine print of the Justice Department guidelines may prove the toughest barrier for Libby to overcome.


Of course, as the article notes, Bush could still pardon Libby. However, he would be unlikely to do so until the end of his presidency, at which point Libby will have had over a year in which to cut a deal against the President. So if the fear for Bush were that Libby will somehow turn "state's evidence" on him or Cheney, then why would he wait?

The irony here, of course, is that MEM is convinced Libby is guilty but seems to actually want Bush to pardon Libby, all to create the inference, right or wrong, that he did so to keep Libby from "spilling the beans."