In essence, the above scenario is what happened to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Scooter was busted for telling lies to the FBI and a grand jury and now has the distinction of being the first White House official in 130 years to be indicted while in office.

But he is guilty of much larger crimes.

Scooter and Paul Wolfowitz are the devious criminal minds behind the Bush gangster doctrine currently responsible for killing around 100,000 Iraqis. Scooter and Wolfowitz devised the Defense Policy Guidance document for Dick Cheney back in 1992. It is now more or less the Bush playbook for “pre-emptive force to prevent countries from developing weapons of mass destruction,” in other words invading Muslim countries that do not have weapons of mass destruction. It was also used as a blueprint when a clique of neocons cobbled together the criminal organization Project for a New American Century. Scooter’s lies were instrumental in the invasion of Iraq—for instance, the fairy tale one of Saddam’s intelligence agents met with supposed nine eleven “ring leader” Mohamed Atta. Scooter was so insistent this lie be included in Colin Powell’s dog and pony show at the United Nations he called him late at night in the eleventh hour and harangued him.

Scooter is a shameless criminal operator. It is said he rang the phones off the wall at the Pentagon after the Iraq invasion to make sure Halliburton received a contract to repair oil wells destroyed during the American invasion he formulated with Wolfowitz. As if to demonstrate crime is well-rewarded in Bushzarro world, Wolfowitz was appointed to run the World Bank, the largest conductor of neoliberal loan sharking on the planet.

As if to further demonstrate his criminal propensity, Scooter once told an aide he planned to stay on as Cheney’s top adviser until “I get indicted or something.” In other words, he understands full well he is a criminal and he thinks his crimes are cute and ingenious. “You never get in trouble for something you don’t say,” Libby also quipped, using an old Sam Rayburn maxim.

Scooter, according to the neocon friendly Washington Post, “has looked gaunt and tired of late, according to those who have seen him, and he told at least two friends and associates that he was thinking of leaving the administration after the 2004 election to spend more time writing and skiing.”

Now he will get the chance. Scooter will not be spending time writing his prison memoirs, though—by the time he is officially indicted, charged, and tried (and then upon conviction appeals and goes through another trial), Bush will pardon him on his way out of office, as Clinton pardoned the Zionist gangster Marc Rich in the waning hours of his administration.

Of course, this assumes Bush will leave office in 2008.

Prison, after all, is for crackheads, not well-connected war criminals, who at worst receive suspended sentences.

Scooter will probably end up like Oliver North. Ollie was indicted on sixteen felony counts and convicted of three in connection to the so-called Iran-Contra Affair—accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents. His conviction was over-turned by a three judge panel. As a reward, Ollie received a book contract and eventually his own television show on Fox News, thus once again demonstrating crime pays.

I don’t know if Scooter will get his own TV show.

But if he does, somebody please find the remote and change the channel.