Shouldn’t a guy like Fitzgerald first determine if a crime has been committed and if it has, then look for the perps?
Either it was or it wasn’t a crime to reveal Plame’s identity. I am not a lawyer, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn a couple times, and it seems to me the first thing Fitzy should have done is check out the statutes. There he would have read, “Nope, no crime here. Plame was fair game. Move along, Mr. Fitzgerald, nothing to see. Go back to your day job.”
But instead of that he launched a protracted and expensive investigation that nails only Scooter Libby, and for nothing more than perjury, for which if found guilty, he will be pardoned anyway, by you know whom. And somewhere in the course of the probe, Fitzy told the world no crime was committed in the first place.
So what was the friggin’ point of it all?
I put this question here because I think it should have a factual answer, one that is not open to debate.
But that’s my point. Perhaps the perjury would not have been committed if Fitzgerald had done his due diligence and aborted the probe because outing Plame was not a crime.
The whole point of Fitzgerald’s careful investigation was to find out if a crime was committed and if so, by whom. That’s what he did. Unlike you, Fitzgerald is just a simple federal prosecutor so his investigation of a network of tightlipped, politically powerful folks took a lot of time and cost a lot of money.
You’re gonna have to do more than simply assert this if you want us to believe it. Valerie Plame’s status as a covert operative whose status was subject to protection from “outing,” as you put it, is well-documented, and the CIA itself thought outing her might be a crime.
And perhaps Clinton’s perjury would not have been committed if Starr had stuck to his original investigation of Whitewater and not gone on numerous fishing expeditions funded largely by Richard Mellon Scaife. Do you really want to play this game?
So, he reads the statute. Great. Then he compares that to the facts to see if there was a crime. But he doesn’t have any facts. So he has to interview people. And investigate. He can’t skip that step because he read an article in the paper that says what happened.
I thought the requirements to make it a crime depended on who it was that leaked the information and what level of access they had? That if CaveMike had guessed her cover and leaked the info, I would be in the clear. But if the head of the CIA leaked the info, it would be a crime. Is that not the case after all?
The answer to both simple questions is yes. Why hasn’t Armitage been indicted? Fitzgerald hasn’t said, although there are two theories. One is that he concluded that Armitage’s actions didn’t violate the narrow definitions in the Intelligence Identitities Protection Act. The other is that an indictment of Armitage could derail the case against Scooter Libby by providing him an affirmative defense.
Getting back to the original question, Fitzgerald was ordered to investigate Plame’s outing to put a respectable face on the beginnings of a nasty scandal. At first, it looked ugly.
At first glance, it seemed that Valerie Plame Wilson’s status as a covert CIA agent had been revealed by somebody in the White House as revenge for an newspaper article Valerie’s husband had written. The article seemed to show that president Bush lied about the uranium in the State Of The Union Address.
Mr. Bush promised an investigation of the leak, and he said the leaker would be fired. Revealing the identity of a CIA spy is a federal crime, but the law is specific about exactly when it’s illegal. If you destroy an agent’s career under some circumstances, it’s not a crime.
As it unfolded, it came out that none of the investigation’s targets were the first to leak the info. So, they didn’t “reveal” it, they “confirmed” an earlier leak.
Then Armitage wandered in and said, “Hey, I think I might have been the one.” There is some clump of things that make Armitage innocent of any crime, but I don’t know what they were.
Right now, everybody’s in the clear except Irving Lewis Libby, who had been VP Cheney’s chief of staff. Yesterday, jurors were being selected.
Very few things that originally seemed obvious were proven to be true.