WASHINGTON -- President Bush, using powers granted under Article II of the Constitution, today commuted the 30-month prison term handed to former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, calling the sentence "excessive."
The President also used the same constitutional powers to change a "D" grade in history from his sophomore year at Yale to a "B," calling the earlier grade "recessive."
"Mr. Libby was a first-time offender with years of exceptional public service and was handed a harsh sentence based in part on allegations never presented to the jury," the president said in a statement released by the White House. "Furthermore, I think it's a bit much to expect a Yale undergrad to know that Austria and Hungary used to be the same empire. They gave them two different names, goddammit."
Mr. Libby was convicted of lying to investigators about his role in leaking the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame as part of a White House effort to discredit allegations by her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that the Bush administration knew that Iraq was not attempting to acquire nuclear materials from Africa in the run up to the latest Gulf War.
Mr. Bush was graded poorly on a paper about 19th Century diplomat Klemens Wenzel von Metternich in part because of his confusion about the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and for mistakenly locating the Congress of Vienna in Mexico.
"I was working on two papers at the same time and one of them was about Francisco Franco, so I made a simple mistake of putting one country where the other belonged," the president said. "Like Scooter, I've suffered, too."
