David Broder is at it again. He simply does not understand, or doesn’t care about, the basic facts in the prosecution of Scooter Libby. I want to make this absolutely clear because David Broder is not supposed to be an apologist for the right-wing that distorts the facts in the pages of the Washington Post. Let’s look at what Broder alleges today.
Their bigger complaint is that the White House official’s conviction on felony counts of lying and obstruction of justice was a byproduct of a “leak” investigation that itself was unnecessary.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald learned soon after taking the job that Richard Armitage, a high-ranking State Department official, and presidential assistant Karl Rove were the sources whom columnist Robert D. Novak used in identifying the role of CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson in her husband’s covert mission that ultimately challenged the Bush administration’s rationale for war with Iraq.
Armitage made his admission immediately, and Rove — who made repeated trips to the grand jury — apparently told a version of his own story that persuaded Fitzgerald not to indict him.
Despite the absence of any underlying crime, Fitzgerald filed charges against Libby for denying to the FBI and the grand jury that he had discussed the Wilson case with reporters. Libby was convicted on the testimony of reporters from NBC, the New York Times and Time magazine — a further provocation to conservatives.
I think they have a point. This whole controversy is a sideshow — engineered partly by the publicity-seeking former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife and heightened by the hunger in parts of Washington to “get” Rove for something or other.
Like other special prosecutors before him, Fitzgerald got caught up in the excitement of the case and pursued Libby relentlessly, well beyond the time that was reasonable.
There is a whole lot of misinformation to chew on here and it requires extensive excerpts (unfortunately) to demonstrate why Broder is way off-base. To start out, let’s looks at something prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in his statement announcing the indictment of Scooter Libby.
FITZGERALD: When you do a criminal case, if you find a violation, it doesn’t really, in the end, matter what statute you use if you vindicate the interest. If Mr. Libby is proven to have done what we’ve alleged — convicting him of obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements — very serious felonies — will vindicate the interest of the public in making sure he’s held accountable.
It’s not as if you say, “Well, this person was convicted but under the wrong statute.”
Actually, that is precisely what David Broder is saying when he insists that there was ‘no underlying crime’. Fitzgerald is saying that the public interest will be vindicated if Libby does jail time for leaking Valerie Plame’s name even if he is not charged under that statute. Broder refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of Fitzgerald’s logic. They got Al Capone for tax evasion…they got Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice, false statements, and perjury. In neither case does that mean that there was no underlying crime.
But Broder makes other mistakes. For example, he says that Fitzgerald pursued Libby ‘well beyond the time that was reasonable’ because he knew early on that ‘Richard Armitage…and…Karl Rove were the sources whom columnist Robert D. Novak used in identifying the role of CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson…’
This one is a bit complicated, so bear with me. Scooter Libby had committed a crime before Patrick Fitzgerald was assigned to the case. And I don’t mean the leaking of Valerie Plame’s employer, I mean lying to the FBI. Fitzgerald explained this at length at the press conference where he announced Libby’s indictment.
FITZGERALD:…When it was clear that Valerie Wilson’s cover had been blown, investigation began. And in October 2003, the FBI interviewed Mr. Libby. Mr. Libby is the vice president’s chief of staff. He’s also an assistant to the president and an assistant to the vice president for national security affairs.
The focus of the interview was what it that he had known about Wilson’s wife, Valerie Wilson, what he knew about Ms. Wilson, what he said to people, why he said it, and how he learned it. And to be frank, Mr. Libby gave the FBI a compelling story.
What he told the FBI is that essentially he was at the end of a long chain of phone calls. He spoke to reporter Tim Russert, and during the conversation Mr. Russert told him that, “Hey, do you know that all the reporters know that Mr. Wilson’s wife works at the CIA?”
And he told the FBI that he learned that information as if it were new, and it struck him. So he took this information from Mr. Russert and later on he passed it on to other reporters, including reporter Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, reporter Judith Miller of the New York Times.
And he told the FBI that when he passed the information on on July 12th, 2003, two days before Mr. Novak’s column, that he passed it on understanding that this was information he had gotten from a reporter; that he didn’t even know if it was true.
And he told the FBI that when he passed the information on to the reporters he made clear that he did know if this were true. This was something that all the reporters were saying and, in fact, he just didn’t know and he wanted to be clear about it.
Later, Mr. Libby went before the grand jury on two occasions in March of 2004. He took and oath and he testified. And he essentially said the same thing.
Libby’s entire story was fabricated. Now, let’s be careful here. When Libby lied to the FBI, Fitzgerald was not yet on the case. But when Libby lied to the grand jury, it was Fitzgerald that was questioning him. Here is what happened. Fitzgerald started his investigation by reviewing what had already been gathered by the FBI, including Libby’s statement. Fitzgerald quickly learned that Libby had made false statements to the FBI and he questioned him about them at the grand jury. Libby continued to lie.
So, from the very first, Fitzgerald had to contend with obstruction of justice and false statements, which were then followed by outright perjury. To say that Fitzgerald pursued Libby far longer than is reasonable is false. He pursued him from the moment he began the investigation…and for good reason. During the press conference, Fitzgerald made an extensive baseball analogy, concluding with:
“And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.”
Libby’s obstruction, from the very outset of the investigation, was preventing Fitzgerald from determining ‘whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, [or] by maliciousness’. In other words, Libby had successfully muddied the waters to the point that it would be difficult to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, who knew what and what had motivated them. But Fitzgerald was convinced that a serious crime had taken place.
“It’s important that a CIA officer’s identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation’s security.”
As Fitzgerald explained, “It’s not as if you say, ‘Well, this person was convicted but under the wrong statute.'”
But Broder is off-base about more than just this. He starts out by saying that Libby’s crimes were nothing but a ‘byproduct of a “leak” investigation that itself was unnecessary.’ There are two rationales for why the investigation was unnecessary. The first is that Fitzgerald solved the question of who leaked to Novak almost immediately, so why continue to investigate? The second rationale is that ‘no underlying crime’ thingie again.
This makes a surface amount of sense. If he learned that Armitage inadvertently leaked classified information then he couldn’t charge Armitage with a crime. Armitage would have had to have ‘knowingly’ leaked classified information in order to be covered under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA). On top of that, Armitage was a cooperative witness that was showing remorse. But there was another leaker: Karl Rove. And Karl Rove was not so cooperative, nor was he remorseful. And then there was the whole problem of Scooter Libby covering up the Office of the Vice-President’s intense interest in the Wilsons. But it is even more complicated than that.
Despite the fact that Armitage decided to confess his role in talking to Novak, he did not disclose that he had talked to Bob Woodward about Valerie Plame weeks before that. In fact, when Fitzgerald announced the indictment of Libby, he still didn’t know about Armitage’s discussion with Woodward (emphasis mine)
“But Mr. Novak was not the first reporter to be told that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Wilson, Ambassador Wilson’s wife Valerie, worked at the CIA. Several other reporters were told.
In fact, Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson.
When Woodward heard Fitzgerald say that he contacted Armitage and got permission to tell Fitzgerald about it. And that late revelation seems to have somehow derailed a planned indictment of Karl Rove. In other words, despite Armitage’s seeming cooperation, he had not provided Fitzgerald with all the facts. It simply isn’t true that Fitzgerald solved the crime early on in his investigation.
