Scooter Libby - Legal Career

Legal Career

After earning his J.D. from Columbia in 1975, Libby joined the firm of Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis LLP, becoming a partner the following year (1976). He was admitted to the bar of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on October 27, 1976, and to the Bar of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals on May 19, 1978.

Libby practiced law at Schnader for six years before joining the U.S. State Department policy planning staff, at the invitation of his former Yale professor, Paul Wolfowitz, in 1981. In 1985, returning to private practice, he joined the firm then known as Dickstein, Shapiro, and Morin (now Dickstein Shapiro LLP), becoming a partner in 1986 and working there until 1989, when he left to work in the U.S. Defense Department, again under his former Yale professor Paul Wolfowitz, until January 1993.

In 1993, returning to private legal practice from government, Libby became the managing partner of the Washington, D.C. office of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander & Ferdon (formerly Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander); in 1995, along with his Mudge Rose colleague, Leonard Garment––who had replaced John Dean as acting Special Counsel to U.S. President Richard Nixon for the last two years of his presidency dominated by Watergate, and who had hired Libby at Mudge Rose twenty years later––and three other lawyers from that firm, Libby joined the Washington, D.C. office of Dechert, Price, and Rhoads (now part of Dechert LLP), where he was a managing partner, a member of its litigation department, and chaired its Public Policy Practice Group, until 2001, when he left to return to work again in government, as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.

Fugitive billionaire commodities trader Marc Rich, who, along with his business partner Pincus Green, had been convicted of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran, and who, with Green, was ultimately pardoned by President Bill Clinton, was a client whom Leonard Garment had hired Libby to help represent around the spring of 1985, after Rich and Green had first engaged Garment. Libby stopped representing Rich in the spring of 2000; early in March 2001, at a "contentious" Congressional hearing to review Clinton's pardons, Libby testified that he thought the prosecution's case against Rich "misconstrued the facts and the law". According to Jackson Hogan, Libby's roommate at Yale University, as quoted in the already-cited U.S. News & World Report article by Walsh, " 'He is intensely partisan...in that if he is your counsel, he'll embrace your case and try to figure a way out of whatever noose you are ensnared in.' " According to House Committee on Government Reform report, however, "The arguments made by Garment, Reynolds and Libby focused on the claim that the SDNY was criminalizing what should have been a civil tax case. They did not make, compile, or in any other way lay the groundwork for, or make a case for a Presidential pardon. When former President Clinton stated that they 'reviewed and advocated' 'the case for the pardons,' he suggested that they were somehow involved in arguing that Rich and Green should receive pardons. This was completely untrue". (p. 162)