Nice round up from Pejman Yousefzadeh, a lawyer/blogger:
http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/10/29/0256/9412
Let’s run through the bullet points:
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There are a whole host of links collected in this post ( Instapundit ) that you really ought to read.
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Evidently, there is no satisfying some people ( The Volokh Conspiracy - - ). Karl Rove should get in trouble for telling the truth? That’s a new one.
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I thought that Fitzgerald’s television appearance was very impressive. He was restrained but principled, he knew the case inside and out and he was clearly at the top of his game in answering the reporters’ questions (in addition to showing a great deal of patience with stupid questions like the very last one asked). Here is the link to the press conference: Fitzgerald News Conference - The New York Times . For all those who want to take this investigation and indictment and turn it into a set of political talking points regarding the validity of the war in Iraq, Patrick Fitzgerald has a message for you:
[i]QUESTION: A lot of Americans, people who are opposed to the war, critics of the administration, have looked to your investigation with hope in some ways and might see this indictment as a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises.
Does this indictment do that?
FITZGERALD: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer’s identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person – a person, Mr. Libby – lied or not.
The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.
And I think anyone’s who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.[/i]
Quite right, of course. It is certainly possible to hold good faith beliefs either way regarding the war, but the use of the indictment as a way to score points in the foreign policy/national security debate is entirely inapposite. Some would even say “dishonest.” Perhaps a different set of rationales should be used by both sides in the debate over Iraq policy. Just sayin’.
I’ll say as well that it is nice to see that there is a hard line being taken against perjury and obstruction of justice. If Scooter Libby is found guilty of having lied and having tried to cover up, he should be thrown to the wolves, as far as I am concerned. As Fitzgerald put it:
[i]FITZGERALD: I’ll be blunt.
That talking point won’t fly. If you’re doing a national security investigation, if you’re trying to find out who compromised the identity of a CIA officer and you go before a grand jury and if the charges are proven – because remember there’s a presumption of innocence – but if it is proven that the chief of staff to the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story about how he learned this information, how he passed it on, and we prove obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements to the FBI, that is a very, very serious matter.
FITZGERALD: And I’d say this: I think people might not understand this. We, as prosecutors and FBI agents, have to deal with false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury all the time. The Department of Justice charges those statutes all the time.
When I was in New York working as a prosecutor, we brought those cases because we realized that the truth is the engine of our judicial system. And if you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost.
In Philadelphia, where Jack works, they prosecute false statements and obstruction of justice.
When I got to Chicago, I knew the people before me had prosecuted false statements, obstruction and perjury cases.
FITZGERALD: And we do it all the time. And if a truck driver pays a bribe or someone else does something where they go into a grand jury afterward and lie about it, they get indicted all the time.
Any notion that anyone might have that there’s a different standard for a high official, that this is somehow singling out obstruction of justice and perjury, is upside down.
If these facts are true, if we were to walk away from this and not charge obstruction of justice and perjury, we might as well just hand in our jobs. Because our jobs, the criminal justice system, is to make sure people tell us the truth. And when it’s a high-level official and a very sensitive investigation, it is a very, very serious matter that no one should take lightly.[/i]
Of course, this should go for any legal investigations–as William Kristol( http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/239rebkj.asp ) (via Drezner: danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: Open Plamegate indictments thread ) hints at:
. . . if anyone lied under oath the way Bill Clinton did–knowingly and purposefully in order to thwart a legitimate legal process, or if anyone engaged in an obstruction of justice, the way Bill Clinton did, then indictments would be proper.
Exactly. And there is this as well:
http://www.nationalreview.com//editors200510281820.asp
[i]Please spare us the excuses warmed over from Democratic talking points in the 1990s: the prosecutor is out-of-control, there was no underlying crime, etc., etc. It is the responsibility of anyone, especially a public official, to tell the truth to FBI agents and grand juries. If Libby didn’t, he should face the consequences. Fitzgerald’s indictment is not a Ronnie Earle-style partisan production, held together with scotch tape and malicious intentions. But this is the prosecutor’s day, when he gets to make the argument against his target unrebutted. Libby will get his chance to respond, and it might be that Fitzgerald’s case looks weaker soon.
But conservatives would be well-advised not to start slamming Fitzgerald. We don’t know all the facts and until we do, his acts are open to dueling interpretations. It seemed unfair for him to talk at his press conference of Libby damaging national security by revealing classified information, when Libby wasn’t charged with that. But this was a departure for the otherwise restrained and responsible Fitzgerald. The Bush administration, for its part, has conducted itself with notable forbearance in this case, avoiding the sort of smears that the Clinton administration routinely resorted to whenever a prosecutor proved inconvenient.
Fitzgerald’s merits aside, the limits of special-prosecutor investigations were once again evident in this case. Two years later, we still don’t know important facts. Was Plame covert? Fitzgerald can’t or won’t say. Who is ?Official A? (although we can all guess)? Who were the other unnamed officials? It is a prosecutor’s job to build a criminal case, period, full stop. But in high-stakes political controversies, that’s not really the public interest ? disclosure is. Then, everyone knows the facts and the public can make its judgments on what is appropriate. Offending officials can be punished with resignations and public obloquy. Except in dire cases ? say, bribery ? that process should take precedence over prosecutions rather than the other way around.
Unfortunately, Republicans and Democrats engage in alternating opportunism over ?the criminalization of politics,? and it is the Democrats? turn to pin their political hopes on the work of a prosecutor. [/i]
* Finally, it would appear that much of the commentariat has settled on the talking point of demanding that the Bush Administration show some kind of vast and general contrition. Said vast and general contrition consists in large part of ignoring the conservatives and libertarians in the country and reaching out to "the middle" (ain't it funny how we are always the ones who are supposed to be left behind in the creation of any and all political coalitions?). Specifically--and this was mentioned on Larry King this evening (yes, I know, I was slumming it)--President Bush should not nominate a conservative to the Supreme Court since that would be "divisive." Interestingly, when many thought that the Clinton Administration, prior to the 1994 midterms, was in its political death throes, no one demanded that President Clinton pass up on opportunities to nominate decidedly non-conservative folk like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court. If there is an explanation for that lack of a general demand that does not involve bias on the part of the commentariat, I would be delighted to hear it. Please make it credible, though.