California Conservative

In his latest work for The Hill Magazine, Byron York asks this logical question about the sham Plame investigation:

Fitzgerald maintains that the most fundamental information in the case, was an underlying crime actually committed, is not important…But for those of us outside the courtroom, for those of us who have been told for years that the leak of Valerie Wilson’s name was a very serious crime, wouldn’t it be a good thing to know whether or not that was true?

This is just further proof that Fitzgerald’s ‘investigation’ was shoddy and a ripoff of taxpayers’ money. I’d go so far as saying that Fitzgerald is a political hatchetman but I don’t have enough proof that he deliberately ignored vital facts in order to get this indictment.

It isn’t a stretch, though, to say that he didn’t go where the evidence led him. He went where the evidence that he wanted to look at took him. Think of it more as starting with a guilty verdict and working backwards. That isn’t my idea of justice. That’s my idea of vindictive prosecution.

Let’s say you’re a federal prosecutor. You’re investigating officials in the Bush White House, trying to find out whether they violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act when they told reporters that Valerie Wilson, wife of the ardent Bush critic Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA. Violations of those laws would be a very serious matter indeed. And just to make your investigation a high-pressure affair, you’re dealing with some very prominent figures, including Lewis Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, and Karl Rove, the president’s top political adviser.

Then you run into a problem. You look and look, but you can’t find enough evidence to charge either man, or anyone else, with breaking the two big national-security laws. But you believe you have a good case that Libby lied to your grand jury. So after more than two years of probing, you charge him with perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements.

So here’s the question: In preparation for trial, Libby’s defense lawyers want you to give them evidence that when you began the investigation you had a good reason to believe that a crime had been committed, that is, that someone had violated the intelligence identities law or the Espionage Act. Do you give it to them?
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First, they want you to turn over documents showing that Valerie Wilson was a covert agent for the CIA at the time she was outed in Robert Novak’s column on July 14, 2003. Then they want the documents showing that Mrs. Wilson had been covert at some point in the five years before she was mentioned in the Novak column, a key requirement for prosecution under the intelligence identities law. And then they want documents outlining the damage Mrs. Wilson’s unmasking has done to national security. At least to an outsider, those might seem like reasonable requests. After all, that’s why you started your investigation, wasn’t it?

In other words, Fitzgerald is playing hardball with these documents because they’ll probably show that there’s no there there to his ‘investigation’. I suspect that they’ll show how biased he is and how predetermined the case against the Administration was. They’ll also likely show that his zeal to take down a big name got the better of him, that the prize was too tempting and his objectivity in the matter was too small.

That isn’t what we paid for and it isn’t what an objective investigator should be doing.

It seems to me that the outcome of this investigation would’ve turned out radically different had Fitzgerald properly investigated the initial charge: that someone in the Bush Administration had outed a covert CIA operative. Had he done that, this wouldn’t have made it to a grand jury, much less to any indictments.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2006 at 6:41 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Homeland Security, Law, Media, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.