The Plame game

Wingnuts downplame the verdict

October 30, 2005

 

MYTH: The Plame case is mainly about Iraq "policy" disputes, and not serious crimes.

Rampant leaks notwithstanding, no one but Patrick Fitzgerald knows all of the criminal evidence the special prosecutor is considering against senior White House officials. Our hope is that he also understands that the job of a prosecutor is not to settle what at bottom is a political and policy fight over the war in Iraq….

Mr. Fitzgerald's original charge was to investigate if anyone had violated the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. But as we and others have repeatedly written, to violate that law someone must have deliberately and maliciously exposed Ms. Plame knowing that she was an undercover agent and using information he'd obtained in an official capacity. Ms. Plame was surely not undercover, and her own husband had essentially made her "outing" inevitable when he exploited his former CIA consultant status (that she had helped him obtain) to inject himself in the middle of a Presidential campaign.

--Editorial, “All About Iraq,” Wall Street Journal, 10/24/05

And here is the point: Unless the perjury is clear-cut or the obstruction of justice willful and determined, we hope that the special prosecutor has the courage to end the inquiry without bringing indictments. It is fundamentally inappropriate to allow the criminal law to be used to resolve what is basically a policy and political dispute within the administration, or between the administration and its critics. One trusts that the special counsel will have the courage after conducting his exhaustive investigation to reject inappropriate criminal indictments if the evidence does not require them, no matter how much criticism he might then get from the liberal establishment that yearns to damage the Bush administration through the use of the criminal law.

--William Kristol, “Fitzgerald’s Moment,” The Weekly Standard, 10/31/05

IT FAILS BECAUSE outside of the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, there is no real debate over Joseph Wilson's credibility. He doesn't have any.

--Stephen Hayes, “The Incredibles,” The Weekly Standard, 10/25/05

REALITY

Take a look at the quotes above and the general tone of the articles out forth from the right-wing media about the Valerie Plame affair and the run-up to Scooter Libby’s indictment, and an interesting trend emerges. The wingnut media seems to ignore the elephant in the kitchen again —the fact that at least senior White House official outed an undercover CIA agent to the world. Running articles that concentrate on the credibility of Plame’s husband or the theory that this whole issue is just a DC policy squabble completely undermines the seriousness of this issue. Not to mention the fact that Joe Wilson's op-ed piece was factually correct, Saddam wasn't buying yellow cake in Africa, and his wife's identity was classified. For more on the elaborate on the history of the Plame affair and how we got to this point. If you would like a refresher on this topic, Wikipedia has a fairly detailed account of the issue.

What if the shoe were on the other foot. I mean the same shoe. Imagine if Bill Clinton had been in office and it was Ron Klain, who was Gore’s chief of staff until 1999, who was accused of outing a CIA agent? How do you think the wingnut press would have reacted to that? Clinton was impeached by a Rebublican House for lying to a grand jury about a personal affair. The right wanted his head on a platter for his own personal indiscretion. Contrast this with the above opinions of the Plame case. Kristol flat out says that the special prosecutor should have “the courage to end the inquiry without bringing indictments.”

Republicans even sent Kay Baily Hutchinson to Meet the Press last to test the trial baloon that it is somehow less serious if the indictments are for perjury or obstruction of justice and not the crime itself. She had trouble making the argument with a straight face, after all she didn't feel that way during the Clinton impeachment. Here's what the Patrick Fitzgerald had to say about the perjury and obstruction of justice:

FITZGERALD: I'll be blunt.

That talking point won't fly. If you're doing a national security investigation, if you're trying to find out who compromised the identity of a CIA officer and you go before a grand jury and if the charges are proven -- because remember there's a presumption of innocence -- but if it is proven that the chief of staff to the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story about how he learned this information, how he passed it on, and we prove obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements to the FBI, that is a very, very serious matter.

FITZGERALD: And I'd say this: I think people might not understand this. We, as prosecutors and FBI agents, have to deal with false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury all the time. The Department of Justice charges those statutes all the time.

When I was in New York working as a prosecutor, we brought those cases because we realized that the truth is the engine of our judicial system. And if you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost.

In Philadelphia, where Jack works, they prosecute false statements and obstruction of justice.

When I got to Chicago, I knew the people before me had prosecuted false statements, obstruction and perjury cases.

FITZGERALD: And we do it all the time. And if a truck driver pays a bribe or someone else does something where they go into a grand jury afterward and lie about it, they get indicted all the time.

Any notion that anyone might have that there's a different standard for a high official, that this is somehow singling out obstruction of justice and perjury, is upside down.

If these facts are true, if we were to walk away from this and not charge obstruction of justice and perjury, we might as well just hand in our jobs. Because our jobs, the criminal justice system, is to make sure people tell us the truth. And when it's a high-level official and a very sensitive investigation, it is a very, very serious matter that no one should take lightly.

Let us not forget what is at the heart of this entire affair—Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, called W’s bluff. W made a claim about Iraq trying to procure uranium from Niger and Wilson went on record, after investigating the claim, stating this was a lie. One of W.’s central claims used to sell Iraq war wasn’t true. And they broke the law to hurt the person that exposed this. Where is the discussion of this in the wingnut media?

The tragedy of neocon ideology was illustrated last week by the 2000th casualty of the Iraq war days before the Libby indictment. The Libby indictment then drove home the viscious cynacism of those behind this war. Part of the dark legacy of the Bush administration was stoicly inked last week by Patrick Fitzgerald. It was a good week for truth. We hope that the seeds of a brighter future have been planted in the wake these revelations.