I remember when the media consensus was that Patrick Fitzgerald was a "straightshooter".
My guess is that the Libby prosecution spells the end of his career. Sure, the far-left is still cheering him on, but rational people on both sides of the aisle are casting furtive glances, holding their nose and fleeing for the exits.
It all has that Nifong stink about it.
Like the Duke rape case, the left seem to have this compulsion to tilt at windmills--even as it was increasingly obvious that the rape charges were bogus, the bobos charged right in on the principle that white boys are rapists on principle. In the Libby trial you have the same thing--a freak show of wild-eyed nutters fishing for salmon in a bucket of water. Meanwhile, several obvious targets of prosecution go begging.
I've ranted about this before, but this time no less a figure than former chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence committee weighs in an amplifies my thoughts.
Victoria Toensing, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, is a Washington lawyer and she has a whole whack of indictments she'd like to file.
THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES PATRICK J. FITZERALD with ignoring the fact that there was no basis for a criminal investigation from the day he was appointed, with handling some witnesses with kid gloves and banging on others with a mallet, with engaging in past contretemps with certain individuals that might have influenced his pursuit of their liberty, and with misleading the public in a news conference because . . . well, just because.THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES THE CIA for making a boilerplate criminal referral to cover its derrière.
HIS GRAND JURY CHARGES JOSEPH C. WILSON IV with misleading the public about how he was sent to Niger, about the thrust of his March 2003 oral report of that trip, and about his wife's CIA status, perhaps for the purpose of getting book and movie contracts.
·THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES THE MEDIA with hypocrisy in asserting that criminal law was applicable to this "leak" and with misreporting facts to wage a political attack on an increasingly unpopular White House.
THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES ARI FLEISCHER because his testimony about conversations differs from reporters' testimony, just as Libby's does.
THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES RICHARD L. ARMITAGE with intentionally keeping silent about being the first person to reveal Plame's identity to reporters and with falsely telling the public that he did so at Fitzgerald's request because he did not want to be publicly embarrassed.
HIS GRAND JURY CHARGES THE U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT with abdicating its legal and professional responsibility by passing the investigation off to a special counsel out of personal pique and reasons of ambition.
Its worth reading it the entire entertaining and devastating critique.
Posted by Mick Stockinger on February 17, 2007 8:06 PM
| Permalink
