Dark Clouds Over the White House; Fitzgerald lets the cat out of the bag [View All]

[Purveyor]

In their whining, complaining, often maudlin closing arguments, Scooter Libby's defense counsel averred that the prosecution had "cast a dark cloud over the White House" – as if that was, in itself, a bad thing, and, in the current context, a very bad thing. Leading prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, in his rebuttal, was quick to retort:

"There is a cloud over the vice president . . . And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice. There is a cloud over the White House. Don't you think the FBI and the grand jury and the American people are entitled to straight answers?"

Libby, Fitzgerald averred, "stole the truth from the justice system."

Ah, but the truth is still out there, waiting to be recovered: the question is, has the trail gone cold? Well, not quite. We know what Fitzgerald's method is: he goes after the underlings, convicts them, and then gets them to "flip" under pressure from a potentially long and arduous prison sentence. There is no doubt, in my mind at least, that that's exactly what he intends to do in this case. After all, he didn't go after one of the most powerful men in Washington just to get a cut-and-dried conviction on a few counts of perjury and obstruction. He's after bigger game. In the hunt for who outed a covert CIA officer named Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald has lived up to his nickname of "Bulldog" – and my guess is that he's going after the big one. Dick Cheney, call your lawyer ….

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