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Defense attorney and former prosecutor E. Lawrence Barcella noted that politicians keep making sentencing guidelines stricter. "Nothing turns a conservative into a liberal faster than a conviction. It's amazing how quickly they actually start thinking about people's civil liberties," he said.

Three of every four people convicted of obstruction of justice have been sent to prison over the past two years, a total of 283 people, according to federal judiciary data. The average term was more than five years. The largest group of defendants were sentenced to between 13 and 31 months in prison, exactly where Libby would have fallen on the charts.

Libby, 56, is the only person charged in the leak scandal, which erupted after CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity was revealed in a 2003 syndicated newspaper column. Libby was not the source for that leak and neither of the two Bush administration officials who provided the information were ever charged.

Left open is whether Bush will pardon Libby on his way out the door.

"To do a pardon at the moment in which the president is the least accountable of his entire term - that's problematic," said Brian Kalt, a law professor who studies presidential pardons at Michigan State University. "It's also very tempting, which is why it has happened."

President Clinton pardoned 140 people on his last day in office, including fugitive financier Marc Rich - whose lawyer was Libby.

On Christmas Eve in 1992, just before he left office, the first President Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and a CIA official as they awaited trial on Iran-Contra charges, as well as four other administration officials who had pleaded or been found guilty in the affair.

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