Thank you, Clarice.
Posted on 03/06/2007 11:25:32 PM PST by STARWISE
In this week's episode of Rome (a superb HBO series which increasingly reminds me of the Nation's Capital), Servilia, whose son was killed in a power grab, knelt before the door of manipulative Attia, mother of Octavian and lover of Marc Anthony, the two men responsible, calling out in a haunting cry,
"Attia of the Julii, I call for justice."
She did so because the unavailing legal system was broken, and curses (which were taken seriously in those days) were the one remaining way most people had to redress grave wrongs.
I call for justice for Scooter Libby because he has had none in this ridiculous matter.
But at whose door do I stand to shout my curses?
Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame who cooked up a series of lies to undermine the Administration in the middle of the war?
The media, which megaphoned them and falsely suggested that someone had deliberately outed an undercover agent for political reasons, following the lead of The Nation's David Corn?
Former CIA head Tenet, who insisted the Department of Justice investigate a routine referral for reasons which are still unclear but seem to be pique and revenge?
Who refused to clarify the record about Wilson: who sent him, and what he found, and what happened to those findings?
For dragging out the declassification of the National Intelligence Estimate which showed the Wilson report supported rather than contradicted the estimate?
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his Deputy Dick Armitage, who knew Armitage leaked and hid from the President and public that fact, letting Libby and the entire White House staff be put through the wringer?
The FBI which poorly investigated the matter, jiggered the notes of the interrogations and somehow lost the key inculpatory notes?
Former Attorney Ashcroft who allowed himself to be nose ringed by the mandarinate into recusing himself from looking into the matter?
Ashcroft's Deputy, Comey, who promised Senator Schumer when he was being confirmed that he would appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter and who then, in direct contravention of the Statute, made the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald, an appointment at odds with the U.S. Constitution?
Comey, who tap danced the nature of the appointment to make it appear that there was an actual crime being investigated and not-as it turns out-that he was handing an open season fishing license to a proven master angler?
And who days later, after unlawfully handing Fitzgerald the powers of the Attorney General, authorized him to look into the process crimes-which in truth is all they ever were after.
Fitzgerald, who set it upon himself to find any process violation he could find, and who tricked an unsuspecting Libby, who knew he'd not leaked Plame's name to anyone into repeated FBI and grand jury interrogations in the hope of finding any memory inconsistency, no matter how immaterial or insignificant on which to hang his hat?
Shall I curse the right side of the aisle which never likes to get its skirts dusty in the forum, even if their enemies are armed to the teeth and eviscerating their allies right before their noses? You know who I mean.
Charge a Clintonite with wrongdoing and the entire Department of Justice sits on the news until his friends have worked out an appropriate spin and a time to leak it when it will do him the least harm.
Consider the merest possibility that someone in the Administration might have done something wrong and Andrea Mitchell has the news of the investigation on the air in an hour and his allies flee in fright that they might get their garments dirty by speaking in his defense.
Shall I blame the judge who let the prosecution get away with introducing into evidence prejudicial news accounts of limited relevance or probative value while denying the defense an opportunity to fully make its case?
Who allowed the prosecutor to make scandalous charges in his rebuttal -- the last thing the jury would hear -- with no evidence on the record for them?
Shall I blame the jury which seems to have been unable to find the pony so it reconstructed it out of flip charts and post it notes?
This entire process has been an outrage from beginning to end.
How preposterous is it to watch Nancy Pelosi strutting about the forum today-her record filled with appointments like William Jefferson's to head Homeland Security and John Conyers to head the Judiciary?
A Speaker who has the chutzpah to say,
"Today's guilty verdicts are not solely about the acts of one individual. The testimony unmistakably revealed -- at the highest levels of the Bush Administration - a callous disregard in handling sensitive national security information and a disposition to smear critics of the war in Iraq."
And I explode with laughter at the Cassius-like Kerry who sneered,
"This verdict brings accountability at last for official deception and the politics of smear and fear.... This trial revealed a no-holds barred White House attack machine aimed at anyone who stood in the way of their march to war with Iraq.
It is time for President Bush to live up to his own promises and hold accountable anyone else who participated in this smear. It is also well past time for Vice President Cheney, who according to the testimony was protected by Scooter Libby's lies, to finally acknowledge his role in this sordid episode."
Sordid the episode is, but not because of anything Libby did. And "a troubling picture" of Washington it is-but not of this Administration.
The Bush crowd is guilty only of terminal naiveté and the foolish idea that high standards of probity will ever beat the opposition's utter unscrupulousness and willingness to misuse the legal system to their own partisan ends, even if it means the ruination of an innocent and capable man and enormous hardship to his family.
Democrats and the Media, I Call for Justice.
I am sorry to come out against a President I so loved and supported, but he has turned out to be weakling against the enemies at home.
My sentiments exactly. At every turn he's done all he can to cover for and enable the Clintons and their criminal accomplices, while he's simultaneously and consistently caved to every effort to get him to prosecute or abandon his closest allies and supporters.
Take Tom DeLay, for example. Tom did more to advance the cause of the administration and the Republican party than any other Republican in Congress. He even fought like a Democrat. When the Travis County DemonRats Nifonged him Bush did nothing to protect him, either by pursuing a Rathergate investigation against the Travis County DemonRat party or by pushing the Congressional pubbies not to amend their ethics rules so an unjust indictment would force DeLay out of office.
Amen to that!
If Bush had the b@%ls he'd pardon Scooter immediately. Afraid to say Bush will never pardon the man. Bush has been letting the left beat him into the ground since he was elected president and will continue to turn the other cheek for the remainder of his presidency.
Ping
Unfortunately Libby was convicted of being a Republican. How come you never hear of Sandy Burglar's crime, or Wm. Jefferson D-Rep. La. stashing 100k in his ice box or Dingy Harry's illegal land deals? Because their democrats and the Justice Dept. led by empty suit Gonzalez doesn't have the guts to prosecute them. What the hell has happened to the rule of law? Unbelievable.
WHy was Libby's attorney soooo AWFUL?? I know he's a DEMOCRAT.
Fred Thompson's segment on the Mark Levin Show yesterday: the Scooter Libby verdict.
Click on the speaker below Fred's picture.
It went to my Dell Jukebox MusicMatch program for download, then played.
Superb article, STARWISE. Thanks for pinging me to it.
Re your statement, which I quoted above, the problem for me is that I just don't believe anymore that there is such a thing as justice. Although there are individual exceptions, broadly speaking, human beings are not inherently good. Those in power rig the system in their favor, and that includes ruthlessly disposing of their enemies -- whether "disposing of" means using a cherished freedom of the press to slander them in a so-called civilized society like ours, or blowing them up in a more primitive society like Iraq.
The author speaks of the "terminal naiveté and the foolish idea that high standards of probity will ever beat the opposition's utter unscrupulousness." Brilliantly stated, for being too nice, too williing to turn the other cheek, is President Bush's one big flaw as regards politics. He keeps expecting people to live up to their better natures when they don't have better natures to live up to.
Your tag line sucks.
Karl Rove had zero to do with any of this other than almost becoming a victim of Fitzgerald and the howling mob. Armitage was the cowardly leaker of the name Plame. But Joseph Wilson, his little miss Valerie, and a small cabal of others inside the CIA and the media are the true bad guys in this saga. I think George Tenet is the baddest one of all, for a lot of reasons.
If I were a Republican politician these days, I would NEVER speak to anyone in the media except in a public forum like a TV show or press conference. I would instruct my staff to never speak to the media, period. All press inquiries would go through my press secretary and myself ONLY. And if I ever discovered that someone on my staff leaked anything to the media -- even if I didn't know for sure who did it -- I'd fire the lot of them and hire a completely new staff.
You're being no such thing. You are either showing your ignorance of the facts of this case, or you are just one more hyper-partisan who deliberately places blame for everything in the wrong place and on the wrong people.
How tragically true.
I agree with this point completely. That whole phony media schtick about how they will never reveal their sources was surely exposed for the lie it is with this case. With the exception of Miller, every media whore, including Novak, spilled their guts to Fitzgerald -- and Libby was essentially convicted on conversations he had with Cooper and Russert.
Of course, had Libby was a Dem, then the whole pack of them would have gone to jail rather than rat him out -- but then...the charges would never have been brought in the first place. There would have been no investigation if Libby was a Dem.
["its not about justice; its about politics and vindictive payback."]
You are spot on.
Thanks for this post ...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Wall St. Journal includes James Comey in the mix:
The Libby Injustice Wall St. Journal 1-20-07
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110009555
As it happens, Messrs. Fitzgerald and Libby had crossed legal paths before. Before he joined the Bush Administration, Mr. Libby had, for a number of years in the 1980s and 1990s, been a lawyer for Marc Rich.
Mr. Rich is the oil trader and financier who fled to Switzerland in 1983, just ahead of his indictment for tax-evasion by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bill Clinton pardoned Mr. Rich in 2001, and so the feds never did get their man.
The pardon so infuriated Justice lawyers who had worked on the case that the Southern District promptly launched an investigation into whether the pardon had been "proper." One former prosecutor we spoke to described the Rich case as "the single most rancorous case in the history of the Southern District."
Two of the prosecutors who worked on the Rich case over the years were none other than Mr. Fitzgerald and James Comey, who while Deputy Attorney General appointed Mr. Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak.
Mr. Fitzgerald worked in the Southern District for five years starting in 1988, at the same time that Mr. Libby was developing a legal theory of Mr. Rich's innocence in a bid to get the charges dropped.
The prosecutors never did accept the argument, but Leonard Garment, who brought Mr. Libby onto the case in 1985, says that he believes Mr. Libby's legal work helped set the stage for Mr. Rich's eventual pardon.
This was all long ago, it's true. But Mr. Libby and Mr. Comey tangled more recently as well.
In 2004, as Mr. Fitzgerald was gearing up his investigation, Mr. Libby was the Administration's point man in trying to get Justice to sign off on the NSA wiretapping program.
In early 2004, Mr. Comey was acting Attorney General while John Ashcroft recovered from gall bladder surgery, and Mr. Comey reportedly refused to give the NSA program the greenlight, prompting the White House to seek out Mr. Ashcroft in the hospital in a bid to circumvent Mr. Comey.
38 posted on 03/06/2007 11:38:29 PM CST by windchime (I consider the left one of the fronts on the WOT.)
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Of mice and men and minutiae ... and retribution.
~~~~~~~~~~
Fitzgerald lied ignominiously and manufactured, out of thin air, conspiracies and plots that just didn't exist .. and with Shakespearean drama. This "deliberate" jury, who seemed to relish their role, bought into his lies and fantasies.
~~~~~
His closing arguments:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110009555
What became unmistakably clear, though, was Fitzgerald’s fundamental theory of the case.
As much as the prosecutor talked about Libby’s alleged lies, it was obvious that Fitzgerald, on Tuesday as well as throughout the investigation, believed his chief target was — and perhaps still is — Dick Cheney.
“What was all the hullabaloo about?” Fitzgerald asked as he discussed the reaction in the vice president’s office to Wilson’s attacks, which had begun after the CIA sent him on a fact-finding trip to Niger.
“The question of who sent Wilson was hugely important, and they wanted everybody to know it wasn’t the vice president.”
That was undoubtedly true; testimony at the trial established, and the prosecution conceded, that the vice president’s office did not, in fact, send Joseph Wilson to Africa.
And since that was the case, it was also true that Cheney, and Libby, wanted everyone to know that the vice president’s office had not sent Wilson to Africa.
Some observers might ask, “What’s wrong with that?”
But the undertone of Fitzgerald’s argument, and, in retrospect, of his entire investigation, was that a simple effort at political pushback — the bid to discredit Wilson — was somehow a criminal act.
Fitzgerald spent a long time going back and forth between Cheney’s handwritten notes on a copy of Wilson’s New York Times op-ed and a set of talking points developed by the vice president’s office.
They tracked closely with each other. The talking points said things like, “The vice president’s office did not request the mission to Niger,” and “The vice president’s office was not informed of Joe Wilson’s mission,” and “The vice president’s office did not receive a briefing about Mr. Wilson’s mission,” and “The vice president’s office was not aware of Mr. Wilson’s mission until this spring, when the press reported it.”
And — here Fitzgerald’s voice dripped with accusation — “It is not clear who authorized Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger.”
Fitzgerald’s presentation proved, if anyone doubted it, that the vice president’s communications staff endeavored to make points that the vice president wanted made.
But for Fitzgerald, it was part of something quite sinister. “The question of who sent Wilson is important,”
Fitzgerald told the jury. “It’s the number-one question in the vice president’s mind.”
“There was a focus on who sent Wilson on this trip,” Fitzgerald continued. “There was an obsession with Wilson.” And that, the prosecutor charged, led to an obsession with revealing the role that Wilson’s wife, former CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson, played in sending her husband to Africa.
“Any effort to tell you that the wife was just separate, an unrelated matter, is just an effort to take your attention away from what the facts are,”
Fitzgerald said. “Wilson’s wife was an answer, a fact, an argument.”
It was all led by Cheney, Fitzgerald charged.
And it all sounded quite ominous.
An hour or so earlier, Wells had remarked on the prosecution’s tendency to focus on the vice president, telling the jury, “The government in its questioning really tried to put a cloud over Vice President Cheney.”
When it was his turn to speak, Fitzgerald quickly picked up on Wells’s image. “They say we’re putting a cloud over the vice president,” Fitzgerald said. “Let’s talk straight. There is a cloud over the vice president.”
Among other things, Fitzgerald charged, with a gravity prosecutors reserve for discussing nefarious acts, Cheney had scribbled in the margins of Wilson’s Times op-ed. “He wrote those notes,” Fitzgerald told the jury.
Couldn’t they see? Fitzgerald seemed to be saying. Couldn’t jurors see the criminality?
Just look at the talking points. “There is a cloud over what the vice president did that week.
We didn’t put that cloud there, and that cloud remains because the defendant has obstructed justice and lied about what happened,” Fitzgerald said. “The cloud is something that we just can’t pretend isn’t there.”
And the cloud wasn’t just any cloud, Fitzgerald argued.
It was a killer cloud.
As he built up to the climax of his presentation, Fitzgerald told the jury that exposing Valerie Plame Wilson’s role in Joseph Wilson’s trip to Africa could have gotten her killed.
And defendant Libby — remember him? — knew it at the time.
Fitzgerald argued that Libby must have known that the subject of Mrs. Wilson’s role was important — and therefore it is unlikely that he forgot about it, as he contends — because he was “discussing something with people that could lead to people being killed.”
“If someone is outed,” Fitzgerald said, “people can get in trouble overseas. They can get arrested, tortured, or killed.”
At that point, the defense objected, in part because Fitzgerald had just bulldozed over one of the main trial rules set down by Judge Reggie Walton.
On the first day of the trial, Walton told the jury, “No evidence will be presented to you with regard to Valerie Plame Wilson’s status.
That is because what her actual status was, or whether any damage would result from disclosure of her status, are totally irrelevant to your decision of guilt or innocence.
You must not consider these matters in your deliberations or speculate or guess about them.”
Walton reminded the jurors of that at several points during the trial, adding a couple of times that even he didn’t know Mrs. Wilson’s status.
Indeed, Fitzgerald never presented any evidence to show that her status was covert, classified, or otherwise.
And of course, after three years of investigation, Fitzgerald did not charge anyone with leaking Mrs. Wilson’s identity.
Yet throughout the trial, Fitzgerald attempted to create an atmosphere of accusation, an accusation that Libby and Cheney and the Bush White House criminally exposed a covert CIA operative.
On Tuesday, he reached for the big payoff.
The problem was, of course, that he had no proof of what he was saying.
After the defense objection, Fitzgerald stressed that he wasn’t telling the jury that any of that happened, only that it could have happened.
And, more importantly, that Libby might have thought it could have happened. And if he did, that would make it important, wouldn’t it?
So it would be something he wouldn’t forget, right?
Fitzgerald told the jurors they should think about this imagined “people being killed” scenario to understand Libby’s “state of mind,” but they should not draw any conclusions about “whether it’s true or false.”
When Fitzgerald finished, Judge Walton felt the need to step in.
“I’m going to give you another cautionary,” he told the jury. “The truth of whether someone could be harmed based upon the disclosure of people working in a covert capacity is not at issue in this case.
Remember what I have told you several times. Mr. Libby is not charged with leaking classified information.”
And with that, the day ended.
~~~~~~~
And so did another big chunk of integrity in our system of justice.
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