http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/politics/09libby.html?ei=5090&en=55631ff335ca1448&ex=1289192400&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1138989791-ZbthNbVwgeW1rEtkpa97nALibby Establishes a Fund to Help Pay Legal BillsBy RICHARD W. STEVENSON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: November 9, 2005
WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 - I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, is establishing a fund to help pay for his legal defense in the C.I.A. leak case, and associates of Mr. Libby have begun soliciting money from his friends and Republican donors, lawyers and people who have been contacted about the fund said on Tuesday.
Barbara Comstock, a Republican communications strategist who has been hired to work with Mr. Libby's defense team, has pulled together a list of potential contributors and has been in touch with some of them in the last week, providing an address in Washington for sending checks, the people said.
Ms. Comstock declined to comment. Other people who have been told of the fund said that their understanding was that names of the donors would not be made public, but that some decisions about how the fund would operate had yet to be made. With Mr. Libby having left government, there is no legal requirement for any public disclosure.
Mr. Libby has put together a high-priced legal team to defend himself against five felony counts of lying to investigators and misleading a grand jury, and lawyers unconnected with the matter have estimated that the bill could run well into the millions of dollars if he goes to trial.
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2005/11/15/libby_defense/Libby's secret defense fundHow much of the money given to Cheney's former aide will come from Halliburton et al.? The public now has no way to know.
By Joe Conason
Nov. 15, 2005
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Her name is Barbara Comstock, a minor figure from the Whitewater era, when she served as "chief investigator" for Rep. Dan Burton, the wigged-out Indiana congressman who once executed a watermelon to demonstrate his sinister theory concerning the fate of Vince Foster, the White House counsel who committed suicide in 1993. During those glory years, she joined David Brock and the rest of the Republican pack in the hunting of Bill and Hillary Clinton. In his memoir, "Blinded by the Right," Brock described Comstock as almost unhinged in her passion to bring down the Clintons.
Comstock calmed down enough to serve as director of public affairs in John Ashcroft's Justice Department, to run opposition research for the Republican National Committee and, ultimately, after leaving government, to join the powerhouse lobbying firm of Blank Rome, best known for its huge contributions to the Republican Party, its close association with former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and other Bush appointees, and its lucky clientele of DHS contractors.
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But Libby's resistance to any such dangerous deal could be enhanced by two factors: the promise that he and his family will not be bankrupted to pay for his defense, and the prospect of a pardon before George W. Bush leaves office. Such self-serving abuse of the pardon power would follow the pattern set by Bush's father in his last-minute reprieve of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the Iran-Contra affair.
That is why Democrats have demanded that the president promise to not pardon Libby -- a demand that ought to be the subject of press questions to the president himself, just as reporters regularly used to ask Clinton whether he intended to pardon Whitewater figure Susan McDougal. (He did finally pardon McDougal, long after she had served 21 months in prison and Starr had acknowledged that there was no case against the Clintons in Whitewater. Clinton didn't grant a pardon to Hubbell, who didn't ask for one.)
Meanwhile, the emergence of Comstock, a corporate lobbyist and Bush loyalist bearing checks with Libby's name on them, is troubling. Unlike the Clinton defense trust, the Libby fund is under no obligation to report the names of donors or the amounts they give. And the public has no way of knowing how much money might be funneled to the Libby defense by the vice president's friends at Halliburton, ExxonMobil and the myriad other corporations and lobbying firms that have fattened themselves on Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the other disasters of the Bush era.