"Ooops, sorry!" -- the Plame train wreck [snip] It turns out that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew within the first few days of his investigation that no crime had been committed and therefore that there was no crime to investigate.
Yet instead of doing the decent thing and informing the Justice Department that there was no crime for which any leaker could be indicted, he went back to Justice and asked for extra authority to pursue perjury and obstruction of justice charges in the case. ======== "Ooops, sorry!" -- the Plame train wreck Wes Vernon September 18, 2006
Ooops, sorry! The taxpayers of America — you and I — have shelled out hard-earned money to pay for the Valerie Plame hoax. What did we get for our money?
Ooops, sorry! A White House in wartime has been under fire because of a non-scandal prompted by little more than cocktail party gossip about a desk-bound CIA bureaucrat. Karl Rove's reputation has been under assault. Scooter Libby is now forced to cough up Lord knows how much money in lawyers' fees. Reporters have been hauled before grand juries to detail who said what to whom. Judith Miller of the New York Times was dispatched to the hoosegow for 85 days because of a story she did not write about a crime that was not committed, and she ultimately lost her job, to boot. Countless people no doubt lost sleep at night because of time and money spent to stay out of jail. Gee, sooo sorry about that.
For all this, what about Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, the man who started it all and lacked the guts to step forward when he saw all these people were grilled day after day and threatened with ruined lives? As he surveys the wreckage strewn all over the landscape, what does he have to say for himself? Roughly translated —
"Ooops! Sorry!"
Lesson learned? Hopefully that this insult to justice will be seen as a cartoon caricature of what happens when the Justice Department chickens out and passes the buck to a "special prosecutor."
A special prosecutor, remember, has no other item on his agenda than one investigation. Unlike your local D.A., his total focus is that one assignment. If he fails to come up with an indictment, he considers himself a failure. That circumstance encourages him to bring down — figuratively speaking — as many dead bodies as possible.
It turns out that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew within the first few days of his investigation that no crime had been committed and therefore that there was no crime to investigate.
Yet instead of doing the decent thing and informing the Justice Department that there was no crime for which any leaker could be indicted, he went back to Justice and asked for extra authority to pursue perjury and obstruction of justice charges in the case. There is no record that Fitzgerald bothered to tell Justice that he was launching a fishing expedition arguably aimed at entrapment.
Valerie Plame was not "a spy." Her undercover work was long past and no longer covered by the Identities Protection Act of 1982. For that, we have the word of one who was "there at the creation." Victoria Tonsing was the Senate negotiator for the measure when Congress was crafting it. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, she adds, "I also know that covert officers are not assigned to Langley [CIA headquarters]," as Valerie Plame was.
Fitzgerald tried mightily to indict someone — anyone. Theoretically, that is not the job of a special prosecutor. His responsibility is to investigate the charges and seek an indictment only if a crime has been committed. If the crime in question simply did not happen, his job is to report back that he is seeking no indictments. That is the spirit of the law. Unfortunately, the law as written allows a special prosecutor to go far afield from his original charge.
Fitzgerald went after Karl Rove, apparently trying to entrap him. Having failed in that endeavor, he went after Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's top aide at the time. He ended up indicting Libby on what amounts to failure to remember the sequence of conversations he had or did not have with reporters and on what day the discussions occurred. No one has put Patrick Fitzgerald under oath to swear — under penalty of perjury — what he had for lunch three weeks ago Tuesday.
For that, Libby has to cough up big money he does not have just to fight a bum rap. Again, President Bush should pardon Scooter Libby, and he should do it now. It is reasonable to speculate that Mr. Bush is waiting until after the November elections so as to deflect any more brickbats from Democrats. That should not deter him. His enemies, many of them funded by the George Soros money machine, have never been at a loss for brickbats, no matter how phony the charge. The president should pardon Libby now, and have a "war room" ready to see to it that if the Dems try to make political hay out of this, it will backfire, just as their judicial filibusters did in '02 and '04.
Fitzgerald, and the law that is "an ass."
One can make a good case that any prosecutor who plays the role of Inspector Javert as Fitzgerald did should be held accountable.
I am informed by legal authority that such is not possible. It should be. Fitzgerald is from Chicago. For what it's worth, here is a passage from the Illinois rules of conduct, the gist of which is applicable nearly everywhere, including D.C. where the investigation took place:
"A public prosecutor or other government lawyer shall not institute or cause to be instituted criminal charges when such prosecutor or lawyer knows or reasonably should know that the charges are not supported by probable cause."
Fitzgerald strikes one as a buttoned-down guy who would not allow himself to be caught in any literal violations of the law or ethics rules. He also seems smart enough that if he wanted to accomplish a goal, he would know how many legal hairs he could split in order to get there. As noted above, he did go back to the Justice Department and asked for an expansion of the investigation.
But Fitzgerald, per se, is not the issue. Rather, he is a symptom of the problem. If the law says a prosecutor can drag on his investigation until he finally snags someone, anyone, for anything — even if the dots connected to the original case are tenuous at best — and that he need not tell those who authorized the investigation that he wants to continue to pursue the whole matter long after he has solved the basic issue in question, if the law says that, I would quote Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist (1837-1839):
"If the law supposes that...then the law is [an] ass — [an] idiot. If that's the eye of the law...the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience — by experience."
Wilson's role
Valerie Plame's clown husband Joseph Wilson had been sent on a mission — at Plame's suggestion — to determine if Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy "yellowcake" from Niger. The Senate Intelligence Committee later found that Wilson lied when he said his wife was not involved with the decision to send him and also about what he actually reported to the CIA regarding the trip. I am not a lawyer, but Victoria Tonsing, who is one, writes the following:
"If the trip was classified for [Vice President Cheney], why was it declassified for Mr. Wilson [who blabbed the whole thing in the New York Times]? Did Mr. Wilson violate any law by revealing his trip or did Mr. Fitzgerald choose not to know?"
Richard "Ooops, sorry!" Armitage
Then there is the conflict over Armitage's account of his interview with Robert Novak, which the columnist has disputed. Leaking Valerie Plame's name was not idle "chit-chat" as Armitage claimed, the columnist writes. Novak says Armitage went out of his way to give details of Plame's role and told him this would be the very kind of information that would fit in with the old Evans-Novak column.
Given Novak's track record of sleuthing his stories for cold hard facts, as opposed to the word of a self-confessed "terrible gossip," the Novak version is more credible. Armitage's credibility was shot when he said he kept his mouth shut all that time because Fitzgerald asked him to do so. It turns out there was a three-month window when Armitage could have spoken up before Fitzgerald was even appointed. Stepping forward would have been the honorable thing for the deputy secretary to do. Instead, Novak was left hanging out to dry while the left went pounding away, besmirching his reputation. Armitage and his boss Colin Powell (who also knew the truth) should be ashamed of themselves — even in a town that knows no shame.
Change the law.
Bottom line: After the election, there should be a congressional investigation to determine whether the use of a "special prosecutor" should be limited or abandoned altogether. The very reason Congress allowed the old post-Watergate special prosecutor law to die a few years ago was that both parties realized from experience that it led to terrible abuses.
That law mandated an outside prosecutor in certain circumstances. Doing away with that ill-advised statute did not go far enough. We need a law placing restraints on the option of appointing a special prosecutor in most if not all circumstances. Exactly where do you draw that line? Hopefully, Congress can craft a law with clear distinctions.
The Justice Department abdicated its responsibility when it bowed to political pressure and appointed a virtually unaccountable prosecutor to do the job we pay Justice to do.
We should not let that happen again. "Ooops, sorry!" doesn't cut it.
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