November 2, 2005
Pat Fitzgerald: A 'Special' Prosecutor
By Pat
Buchanan
Unlike Archibald
Cox and Lawrence Walsh, Patrick Fitzgerald is no posturing partisan
who assumed he had been chosen by Divine Providence to take on
a White House and bring down a president.
Pat Fitzgerald
is a strict constructionist of the law. And for that, the Bush
White House can be eternally grateful.
As indictment
week began, there were reports Karl Rove, "Scooter"
Libby and several other White House aides would be indicted in
a criminal conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Joe Wilson
and out his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent.
Some thought
Fitzgerald would name Vice President Cheney an unindicted co-conspirator,
as Nixon was in Watergate, and put the Bush White House on trial
for having lied the country into war.
But Fitzgerald
refused to go beyond his mandate, or the evidence. No conspiracy
was charged. No one was indicted for outing Plame. Only "Scooter"
Libby was charged -- for lying about a crime he did not commit.
To be exact,
Fitzgerald, using a baseball analogy, said he could not indict
Libby for outing Plame because he could not know for certain Libby
deliberately revealed her identity, due to all the sand Libby
threw in his eyes -- i.e., all the lies he told. Thus, no one
was indicted for the crime Fitzgerald had been appointed to investigate.
After 22
months, Pat Fitzgerald came in with a Martha Stewart indictment,
though Libby, staring at years in prison for serial lying about
something more serious than a stock transaction, may reject the
simile.
Whatever
his politics, Pat Fitzgerald seems an eminently fair man. He accepted
Rove's request to testify to the grand jury for a fourth time
to explain why he failed to reveal a conversation with Time's
Matt Cooper. He heeded a plea from Rove's attorney not to indict
his client, who, after all, had told Fitzgerald the truth about
other crucial conversations, but had forgotten the Cooper phone
call.
Fitzgerald
apparently decided to err on the side of not destroying Rove's
reputation, career and life, because he still had some doubt as
to whether Rove had deliberately deceived him.
Compare,
if your will, Pat Fitzgerald to Ronnie Earle, the man who indicted
Tom DeLay for violating a law that was not on the books when the
House minority leader was alleged to have broken it.
There is
something else commendable that Fitzgerald has done. He has refused
to criminalize politics.
After listening
to 22 months of secret testimony, Fitzgerald had to know Cheney's
office and the White House Iraq Group had run a media campaign
to destroy the credibility of Iraq war critic Wilson. He had to
know that when Scott McClellan told the press no one in the White
House had a hand in outing Plame, McClellan had either been lied
to by White House colleagues, or had lied himself.
But Fitzgerald
hewed to the letter of the law. If White House aides were savaging
Wilson by backgrounding the press and lying to the country, that
was not his problem. But if they lied to him or the grand jury,
that was his problem -- and his jurisdiction.
There exists
the possibility that had Libby told the truth -- i.e, yes, we
were out to discredit Wilson, but in leaking Plame's name we did
not know she was covert -- this investigation might have shut
down without a single indictment. Indeed, how does one explain
how Libby, a smart man, could go before a grand jury and testify
under oath in direct contradiction of his own notes that he had
just given the prosecutor? The only rational explanation is that
Scooter is building an insanity defense.
Also to
his credit, Fitzgerald told the nation at his press conference
not to draw any conclusions about the war from the indictment
of Libby:
"This
indictment is not about the war. ... People who believe fervently
in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed
feelings about it, should not look at this indictment for any
resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.''
What the
special prosecutor is saying here is that it is not his business
to do the job that Congress failed to do in 2002, when it gave
Bush a blank check to take us to war without looking hard into
White House claims of an imminent and mortal peril from an Iraq
nuclear arsenal.
In contrast
to Congress, Pat Fitzgerald came to Washington and did the job
he was assigned to do. He carried out his mandate, but refused
to go beyond it. He indicted for what he believed were violations
of law, not violations of ethics -- and only on the charges he
believed he could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. We need more
public servants with this kind of conscience -- and conscientiousness.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
