Via today's WSJ...
Written by Peter Berkowitz
* * *
* *
A revelation in journalist Judith Miller’s new memoir,
“The Story: A Reporter’s Journey,” exposes unscrupulous conduct by Special
Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald in the 2007 trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
* THIS CERTAINLY DOESN'T SURPRISE ME; LIBBY WAS
RAILROADED WHILE TWO SCUMBAGS - COLIN POWELL AND RICHARD ARMITAGE - WERE THE
ONES WHO SHOULD HAVE FACED (NOT JAIL, BUT) PUBLIC DISGRACE.
Ms. Miller, a former New York Times reporter, writes that
Mr. Fitzgerald induced Miller to give what she now realizes was false
testimony.
By withholding critical information and manipulating her
memory as he prepared her to testify, Ms. Miller relates, Mr. Fitzgerald
“steered” her “in the wrong direction.”
Ms. Miller’s inaccurate testimony helped Mr. Fitzgerald
persuade a Washington, D.C., jury in 2007 to find Mr. Libby, former chief of
staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, guilty of obstruction of justice, making a
false statement and perjury.
Mr. Fitzgerald’s conduct warrants revisiting not only to
set the record straight about Mr. Libby, but also to illustrate the damage that
can be done to national security by a special counsel who, discovering no
crime, generates through his investigations the alleged offenses he seeks to
prosecute.
According to the conventional view, in the summer of 2003
Mr. Libby compromised national security by unlawfully outing a covert CIA
agent.
* IN ACTUALITY HE DID NO SUCH THING.
Mr. Libby’s supposed purpose was to punish the agent’s
husband, who challenged President George W. Bush’s assertion in his 2003 State
of the Union address that the British government learned that Iraq had sought
to purchase African uranium.
* AN ASSERTION THAT WAS 100% ACCURATE - BRITISH
INTELLIGENCE DID SHARE THIS ANALYSIS WITH US!
According to the standard anti-Bush account, when Mr.
Libby became enmeshed in a federal investigation, he lied to conceal his crime
and protect Mr. Cheney.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
This account is false in all essential respects, as Mr.
Fitzgerald — since 2012 a partner in the Chicago office of the Skadden Arps law
firm — had reason, as well as an ethical obligation as an officer of the court,
to know.
Scooter Libby did not “out” CIA employee Valerie Plame.
That was done by then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a critic of
the conduct of the Iraq war.
* AND COLIN POWELL'S RIGHT HAND MAN...
(*CLENCHING MY JAW*)
Mr. Armitage disclosed to columnist Robert Novak that Ms.
Plame, who at the time held a desk job in the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation
Division...
* "A DESK JOB." SHE WAS AN UPPER-MID-LEVEL BUREAUCRAT.
SHE WASN'T A SPY.
...urged the agency to send her husband, retired Ambassador
Joseph C. Wilson, to Africa in early 2002 to investigate whether Iraq had
sought uranium.
Mr. Fitzgerald didn’t charge anyone with leaking Ms.
Plame’s identity or disclosing classified information to reporters.
* ONE MORE TIME, FOLKS...
Mr. Fitzgerald didn’t charge anyone with leaking Ms.
Plame’s identity or disclosing classified information to reporters.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
From the moment he took over the FBI leak investigation
in December 2003, Fitzgerald knew Mr. Armitage was the leaker...
* WHAT'S THAT...??? ONE MORE TIME PLEASE...
From the moment he took over the FBI leak investigation
in December 2003, Fitzgerald knew Mr. Armitage was the leaker...
(*PURSED LIPS*)
* AND, FOLKS... TO MAKE IT WORSE... POWELL KNEW WHO THE
LEAKER WAS AS WELL - AND KEPT PRESIDENT BUSH IN THE DARK.
* FOLKS... RICHARD ARMITAGE IS A PIECE OF $HIT! (AND SO IS
POWELL!)
* NOW... TO CONTINUE FROM THE TOP...
From the moment he took over the FBI leak investigation
in December 2003, Fitzgerald knew Mr. Armitage was the leaker, but declined to
prosecute him, Mr. Rove or Mr. Harlow because the disclosure of Ms. Plame’s
identity wasn’t a crime and didn’t compromise national security.
(*SILENCE*)
Mr. Fitzgerald nonetheless pressed on for someone to
prosecute, eventually focusing on Mr. Libby, whose trial became a contest of
recollections. The excruciatingly inconsequential question on which his
conviction turned was whether, as Mr. Libby recalled, he was surprised to hear
NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert ask him about Ms. Plame in a phone call
on July 10 or 11, 2003. In November 2003, Russert (who died in 2008) told the
FBI that he didn’t recall mentioning Mr. Wilson’s wife to Mr. Libby, but
couldn’t rule it out. By August 2004 Russert had changed his story. Under
questioning by Mr. Fitzgerald, he insisted he could not have mentioned Ms.
Plame.
* NICE, HUH? RUSSERT IS THE ONE CHANGING HIS STORY...
RECANTING... AND YET LIBBY ENDS UP GOING TO JAIL BASED IN PART ON RUSSERT'S
"RE-IMAGINED" TESTIMONY.
Despite the many reasonable doubts that Mr. Libby’s
lawyers raised about Russert’s recollection, Mr. Libby was convicted for what
he said about a phone conversation during which the prosecutor himself insisted
Ms. Plame was not mentioned.
(*HEADACHE*)
Although the case centered on conflicting recollections
of a four-year-old phone call, Judge Reggie B. Walton denied the defense
request to present scientific testimony on the unreliability of memory.
(*SILENCE*)
Jurors might have welcomed it: During deliberations,
according to juror Denis Collins, they lamented their lack of expert knowledge.
In any event, Mr. Libby’s and Tim Russert’s differing memories shouldn’t have
mattered since Mr. Armitage disclosed Ms. Plame’s CIA employment.
* ONE WOULD THINK!
Still, Mr. Fitzgerald, who declined to respond to written
questions for this article...
* WHAT... A... SCUMBAG!
...sought a conviction, and he went so far as to jail
Judith Miller for 85 days to obtain evidence against her sources, one of whom
was Mr. Libby.
Ms. Miller’s new memoir recounts that after her
conditions had been met and Mr. Fitzgerald asked the court to release her from
jail in September 2005, she was summoned to testify before the grand jury.
While Mr. Fitzgerald prepared her, she recalls, his pointed queries led her to
believe that a four-word question regarding Joseph Wilson surrounded by
parentheses in her notebook — “(wife works in Bureau?)” — proved that Mr. Libby
had told her about Ms. Plame’s CIA employment in a June 23, 2003, conversation
(well before Mr. Libby’s phone conversation with Russert). She so testified at
trial in 2007.
Three years later, Ms. Miller writes, she was reading Ms.
Plame’s book, “Fair Game,” and was astonished to learn that while on overseas
assignment for the CIA Ms. Plame “had worked at the State Department as cover.”
This threw “a new light” on the June 2003 notebook jotting, Ms. Miller says,
since the State Department has “bureaus,” while the CIA is organized into
“divisions.”
* FOLKS... THIS ISN'T SIMPLY SEMANTICS. THIS IS GOV-SPEAK
AND AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE UNDERGRADUATE WITH A CONCENTRATION IN INTERNATIONAL
AFFAIRS I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT DELINEATED LANGUAGE SUCH AS "BUREAU"
vs. "DIVISION" IS INDEED WHAT EVERYDAY COMMUNICATION IN WASHINGTON
REVOLVES AROUND.
Ms. Miller, who had spoken to many State Department
sources around the same time she spoke to Mr. Libby, says in her memoir that
she then realized she must have begun her conversation with him wondering
whether Mr. Wilson’s wife worked at the State Department. Ms. Miller also now
understood that “If Libby, a seasoned bureaucrat, had been trying to plant her
employer with me at our first meeting in June, he would not have used the word
Bureau to describe where Plame worked.”
* THIS A*B*S*O*L*U*T*E*L*Y MAKES P*E*R*F*E*C*T SENSE!
Mr. Fitzgerald, who had the classified file of Ms.
Plame’s service, withheld her State Department cover from Ms. Miller — and from
Mr. Libby’s lawyers — who had requested Ms. Plame’s employment history.
Despite his constitutional and ethical obligation to
provide exculpatory evidence, Mr. Fitzgerald encouraged Ms. Miller to
misinterpret her ambiguous notes as showing that Mr. Libby brought up Ms.
Plame.
(*MORE SILENCE*)
If Ms. Miller had testified accurately, she would have
dealt a severe blow to Mr. Fitzgerald’s central contention that Mr. Libby was
lying when he said he was surprised to hear Russert mention Ms. Plame.
* OBVIOUSLY!
Dismayed that her inaccurate testimony may have “helped
convict an innocent man,” Ms. Miller did what a reporter does: She
investigated. She learned from Mr. Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate, that, as she
recounts in her book, “Fitzgerald had twice offered to drop all charges against
Libby if his client would ‘deliver’ Cheney to him.”
* THAT SON OF A BITCH, FITZGERALD...
Harvard psychology professor Daniel L. Schacter, author
of “The Seven Sins of Memory” and one of the nation’s leading memory experts,
told Ms. Miller that “the jury lacked the information it needed about memory
failure” to assess fairly Mr. Libby’s statements.
* FRANKLY, A COMPETENT JURY SHOULDN'T HAVE CONVICTED IN
ANY CASE. THERE WAS NO ACTUAL PROOF ONE WAY OR THE OTHER. CLEARLY THERE WAS
REASONABLE DOUBT!
[Furthermore,] in a 2013 interview, Mr. Cheney told Ms.
Miller that in the summer of 2003 — as the Plame affair erupted, criticism of
the White House mounted and post-invasion Iraq deteriorated — Mr. Libby took
the lead within the Bush administration in arguing for a counter-insurgency
strategy. (In 2007 Gen. David Petraeus successfully implemented the surge. It
is painful to contemplate how many American and Iraqi lives might have been
spared if Mr. Libby, the foremost champion inside the White House in 2003 of
stabilizing Iraq through counterinsurgency, had not been sidelined and
eventually forced to resign by Mr. Fitzgerald’s overwrought investigation and
prosecution.)
* POWELL AND ARMITAGE... THEY HAVE BLOOD ON THEIR
HANDS...
On Oct. 28, 2005, at the news conference on the day of
Mr. Libby’s indictment, Mr. Fitzgerald accused him of harming national security
by throwing sand in federal investigators’ eyes. The allegations against Mr.
Libby were grave, the prosecutor argued, because “the truth is the engine of
our judicial system.” Yet it was Mr. Fitzgerald who threw sand in the eyes of
Ms. Miller and the American people — and in the gears of the U.S. legal system.
As special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald placed his quest
for a conviction above the search for truth and the pursuit of justice.
* A POLITICIZED CONVICTION...
* AGAIN... FITZGERALD DIDN'T EVEN TRY TO BLACK POWELL'S
NAME OR ARMITAGE'S NAME! NO... HE WAS AFTER CHENEY - AND WHEN HE COULDN'T GET
CHENEY... HE TOOK OUT HIS FRUSTRATION ON LIBBY.
* BTW...
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