Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Closing Time

Doesn't Patrick Fitzgerald's summation to the jury in the Plame leak trial rather wreck his case?

In his closing argument, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the chief prosecutor, said that disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity was used by the White House to discredit her husband’s assertions that the Bush administration had distorted intelligence to justify invading Iraq. He said the disclosure of her name cast a cloud over the Bush White House in general and over Mr. Cheney in particular. ...

Mr. Fitzgerald and Peter Zeidenberg, another prosecutor, told the jury that Mr. Libby learned about Ms. Wilson’s role as a Central Intelligence Agency employee from several of his fellow Bush administration officials. He then discussed her with reporters, they said, as part of an effort to discredit the claims made by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the administration had twisted intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium from Africa to justify going to war.

Yet here are the three things we know or understand about the leak:

1) It certainly was not illegal.

2) It probably did no serious damage to national security.

3) Libby was not responsible for it.

Fitzgerald's task in this trial is to send a man to prison for something that was not illegal, not important and that he did not do.

A tough assignment! Fitzgerald's indictment responded to the problem by arraigning Libby for lying to investigators and not the underlying offense.

And yet now at the end, Fitzgerald has reverted to the exploded and disproven accusation that Libby leaked Plame's name. If I were sitting on that jury, and heard this summation, I would have only one question: Why am I judging this man Lewis Libby and not Richard Armitage? If disclosing Plame's name was such a monstrous offense, why did Fitzgerald not indict the man who did the deed? It's as if Ken Starr  hadindicted Lanny Davis in the Monica Lewinsky perjury case.

Which raises this final thought - what will happen to Richard Armitage? Here's a guy who - according to Democrats and liberals - was the true author of the national security crime of the century, our contemporary equivalent of Julius Rosenberg. Yet he continues to run his business, go to parties, be quoted in news stories. He's a completely accepted and acceptable member of Washington society. And as I search even the lefty blogs, I see no particular animus directed his way. How can that be? Would you invite the Rosenbergs to your dinner party or international conference? Could it be that even the Plame-case enthusiasts secretly understand that this whole case is much ado about nothing?

02/21 10:51 AM