Fizzy persecuted Scooter because he couldn't get to Rove, so he went for a neo-con from Cheney's cadre. Scooter copped the charge because (a) he had lousy lawyers and (b) he wanted the Judith Miller affair out of the news.
On August 28, 2006, Christopher Hitchens asserted that Richard Armitage was the primary source of the Valerie Plame leak and that Fitzgerald knew this at the beginning of his investigation.[131] This was supported a month later by Armitage himself, who stated that Fitzgerald had instructed him not to go public with this information.[132] Investor's Business Daily questioned Fitzgerald's truthfulness in an editorial, stating "From top to bottom, this has been one of the most disgraceful abuses of prosecutorial power in this country's history...The Plame case proves [Fitzgerald] can bend the truth with the proficiency of the slickest of pols."[133]
AG Fitzgerald went after Scooter, as the only scapegoat he could snare in a he-said-she-said perjury trap on the erroneous legal premise that the WH “went after” (sought to harm/damage) an individual - the husband of a CIA employee, by “intentionally revealing” the CIA employment aspect of his wife, in order to “cause harm” to an individual whose speech they sought to “suppress”. Nonsense.
The legal premise Fitz employed was wrong and erroneous on a number of counts.
(1) The nature of Ms Plame’s work was not first disclosed by the WH.
(2) What disclosures concerning her identity that did reach the public did not breach any Federal law, given the context of her work and previous disclosures of who she was.
(3) The WH did not “target”, did not “go after”, did not seek to “damage” or “harm” Ms Plame or her husband. The WH “went after” the erroneous story Ms Plame’s husband was telling about an investigation the CIA and State department had sent him on, the “evidence” that investigation produced and the government’s analysis of what was learned by that so-called “investigation”. The interpretation of all these points by Ms Plame’s husband were refuted and contradicted in Congressional testimony by the others in government actually involved in the affair. Ms Plame’s husband’s story was false and the WH had an obligation and responsibility to “go after” that story and refute it. In the process the CIA identity of Ms Plame’s employment was incidental, non-lethal, not illegal, collateral information made public first NOT by the WH or Scooter.
AG Fitz proved himself to be a self-aggrandizing thug seeking a name for himself in history. We can only hope history makes it a name of shame.