I’m with Mark Steyn on the deeply annoying superciliousness of Judge “Reggie” Walton, but, layman in all matters of the law that I most certainly am, I’m quite willing to defer to Andy on His Honor’s legal obligation to tell Libby to go to prison the moment the warden finds him a cell.
But there’s a big part of this I still don’t get: Judge Walton called the evidence against Libby “overwhelming.” This just doesn’t fit. Not with the courtoom reporting in the Times and here on NRO, where Byron York kept us all up to date. Any fair-minded person, I figured, would have to grant that, even if on balance it weighed against Libby, the evidence wasn’t “overwhelming” but mighty darned confusing—Libby’s memory against that of Tim Russert and others, as traced through pages and pages of testimony, about who said what during telephone calls that took place months and months ago.
“Overwhelming?” Either Judge Walton is a thorough stinker of a jurist or yours truly is missing something.