The Heart of the Investigation

Clarice Feldman, writing in the Weekly Standard, cuts at the Fitzgerald investigation none too kindly:

The theory of the case in which a "thuggish" White House set out to punish Joe Wilson simply wasn't true. Instead, as noted by the astute observer Tom Maguire (who reported on the case in great detail at his website justoneminute.typepad.com), Fitzgerald seemed "to be investigating 'Did the White House conspire to out Ms. Plame?' rather than 'Who outed Ms. Plame?'"

This may explain the odd focus of Fitzgerald's investigation, including his outrageously prejudicial remarks at the October 28, 2005, press conference in which he announced Libby's indictment for perjury, false statements, and obstruction, as well as his decision to proceed with such a thinly justified indictment. Fitzgerald had obviously bought the Corn-generated Emma Peel-on-the-railroad-tracks fable.

Later, she suggests that Fitz too-eagerly bought the 1x2x6 meme that was pushed at the outset of the 'scandal': Barely a month into his investigation, in February 2004, Fitzgerald sought and quickly received from Comey an expansion of his mandate to cover process crimes such as perjury and obstruction. In retrospect, this should have been a tipoff that Fitzgerald was changing focus from the underlying "crime"--which was nonexistent. Judging from the parade of witnesses who would eventually be called before the grand jury, it seems he and his team of investigators were under the impression that before Novak's column ran, a senior administration official had told two White House officials to leak the Plame story to six reporters. This notion might well have been gleaned from a poorly written, later edited, account in the Washington Post. This inaccurate, thinly sourced story--which might well have been told to Fitzgerald's investigators as well as to the Post--somehow seems to have become the template for the investigation, which from then on focused on who those presumptive two White House officials were.

The source of this claim, which so distorted the prosecution's view of the matter, has not been revealed. In discovery, Libby's defense team made clear that they think it was Marc Grossman, Armitage's undersecretary for political affairs, who they contend has been a friend of Wilson's since the two went to college together. That Fitzgerald bought into the left-wing typology of bad leakers (defenders of the Iraq war like Libby) and blameless leakers (Armitage) is evident in his August 27, 2004, affidavit to the court seeking to compel the testimony of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who had discussed the Wilson story with Libby but never published anything about it. At the time he filed the affidavit, he of course knew that Armitage had been Novak's source.

He knew better but didn't stop. Overcoming the force of inertia, afterall, requires somewhat of an effort:

...the prosecutor fixed his course on determining whether Rove or Libby said anything to any reporter prior to Armitage's conversation with Novak on July 8, 2003. His lodestar was a June 10 memo prepared by Carl Ford Jr., assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, detailing a meeting of INR and CIA officials at which Plame had introduced her husband and explained the mission the agency intended to send him on. To Fitzgerald, the source of any "bad" leak had to be found among the recipients in the White House of this memo.

Marc Grossman plays a role in this as well. The memo was originally written for him. He says that when Vice President Cheney asked who Nick Kristof's unnamed ambassador was, and how and why he had been sent to Niger--remember, Wilson had suggested to reporters that he'd gone at Cheney's "behest," and Cheney most certainly had not "behested" this--Grossman asked Ford to prepare the memo. It was redated July 7, 2003, and while it never was distributed to the White House, it was faxed to Armitage and Powell. Why the original memo was not given a new cover, instead of being redated and readdressed, is still a mystery. The memo never suggests that Plame was covert or even classified, which seems odd, too, given that, were her identity to be kept secret, there'd be no reason to identify her in the memo and even less reason for her to have attended a meeting at which she introduced her husband to State Department officials. As Armitage put it earlier this month, in an interview with CBS News, while the document was classified, "it doesn't mean that every sentence in the document is classified. I had never seen a covered agent's name in any memo in, I think, 28 years of government."

So is bad-lawyering or something else? Knowing for sure is difficult, if not near impossible but Feldman offers this as an attempt at answering the question: If the prosecutor had asked and Armitage had failed to reveal the conversation with Woodward, and Armitage had then for years refused to allow Woodward to reveal this information to the prosecution, Armitage obstructed the investigation. If, as seems more likely, the prosecutor, with Armitage's notebooks and calendar in hand, never asked him about his conversations with other reporters, Fitzgerald would now seem to be trying to disguise his own mishandling of the investigation as obstruction by others. You cannot wear blinders and suggest someone kept you from seeing the whole picture.

Feldman refers back to the preceding paragraphs where she insists that Fitzgerald relied too heavily on Grossman's recollections of events. The conclusion reached is one of two things; either Fitz is too easily confused by bright and shiny things or he went where his preconceived ideas took him.

We end with the "case" against Libby, which condenses down to this:

In any event, that's the case against Libby. Two reporters whose testimony is not likely to stand up well under cross examination, and one reporter who says that he and the only charged defendant (Libby) never discussed the woman at all.

And as for Armitage, who did tell a reporter, and who told a second reporter, Woodward, whom he kept from coming forward in a timely fashion with the truth--that Armitage had told him long before Libby spoke to any reporter about the matter--well, Fitzgerald calls him an "innocent accused." The prosecutor who directed Armitage not to tell the president or anyone else that he was the source dares to charge another man with obstructing his so-called investigation.

Meanwhile Libby, who fully cooperated with the prosecution, told what he recalled as best he could recall, and promptly gave waivers of confidentiality to all reporters known to have talked to him in this period, is charged with crimes for which the prosecutor is seeking a 25-year prison term.

Were it not reflective of an unacceptable level of negligence and/or incompetence, it would be funny. Instead, it's just sad. Three years and hundreds of thousands of our dollars, for this?