Libby

I can't say that I have followed all the legal details, but I am convinced that this case has been and continues to be blown all out of proportion for...surprise!...political reasons.  An interesting opinion piece written by an American and reported in The Australian describes the back story:

...before you start wondering when you will first hear the world "impeachment" from excited Democratic lips, you should be aware that the hysteria is not supported by the facts.

It may be true that the prosecutor himself repeatedly implied that his case was a bigger one than simple perjury by Mr Libby over a conversation he had with a reporter, but he never dared explicitly to try to make that case.

Mr Libby was never tried for deliberately trying to out the identity of the CIA operative, Valerie Plame, for the very good reasons, as prosecutors well knew, that

1 He didn’t do it; and

2 Even if he had it would not have been a criminal offence.

The man who did originally leak her name was Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state between 2001 and 2005. Far from being a key figure in the demonology of the anti-Bush crowd, Mr Armitage was himself an internal critic of Mr Bush, Mr Cheney and Mr Libby.

He leaked Ms Plame’s name because he wanted a reporter to know the circumstances in which her husband was selected by the CIA for the task of investigating one of the administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMD.

He never faced prosecution because the prosecutors determined that it was not a crime to leak the name. So there goes the argument that Cheney-Libby would stop at nothing – including lawbreaking – to discredit critics of their case, because they somehow knew that all along they were misleading the public about the case for war.

What Mr Libby did was not to use the powerful weapons of government at his disposal to destroy Mr Cheney’s critics, but to try to avoid telling the truth about conversations he had with reporters about Ms Plame.

This was a foolish – and now we know, criminal – thing to do. But it speaks more to the obsessive secrecy in which Mr Cheney’s office is wont to function than to any grand conspiracy to distort information about the case for the war against Iraq.

Mr Libby is the guilty perpetrator of a small lie but the innocent victim of a much larger character and political assassination by a prosecutor – now joined by jurors – who never dared to try to make a legal case out of what remains no more than a conspiracy theory.

Libby's wife was reportedly in tears as the verdict was read.

Addendum: 

Mark Steyn doesn't understand American justice:

I have no idea whether Scooter Libby is a “good man” or a partisan hack, but I certainly hope he has a Bush pardon in his pocket or in his shoes I’d be making a break for the border. I never feel more foreign than when observing contemporary American justice, which seems to the outsider to have absolutely no sense of proportion. Mr Libby has been convicted of lying about his recollection of a conversation. The lies about who leaked Mrs Wilson’s name, the lies about what her husband was told in Niger and what he reported back to the CIA and how he got the job in the first place, all these are still out there. And in particular the leaker Armitage – who remained silent as the drip-drip-drip of speculation corroded the Administration’s integrity month in month out – remains a beloved figure on the social scene, full of delightful asides and amusing gossip. Only the peripheral lie about the minor lie arising from major lies is to be punished.