Political Commutations: Scooter Libby, Jimmy Hoffa & Sentencing Disparity
By
Benson Weintraub [Benson Weintraub is a sentencing lawyer is Of-Counsel to the Law Offices of Robert David Malove, P.A.,in Fort Lauderdale and former Visiting Professor of Law at Hofstra University. While in law school, he worked on the Hoffa litigation under the direction of civil rights lawyer, Leonard Boudin.]
The political implications of Lewis Libby’s commutation of sentence by President Bush continue to reverberate, but this case summons 
memories of the suspicious circumstances 
under which President Nixon commuted the sentence of former Teamsters President, James R. Hoffa, 1971.
Hoffa and Libby were both convicted of obstruction of justice, but Hoffa had already served part of his thirteen-year sentence. That was enough to encourage exposure of the links between organized crime, the old International Brotherhood of Teamsters [IBT], and the intersection of such ties with money and politics.
Similarly, Bush and Cheney also appeared to fear that Libby’s imminent incarceration would lead him to cooperate with the Special Prosecutor, perhaps engendering a political scandal making Watergate look like a misdemeanor.
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