Say Anything Blog

The Plame scandal was an odd bit of America political theater in that it was ostensibly about political retribution in the form of an “illegal” leak of the identity of a “covert” CIA agent.  Yet, despite years and tens of millions of dollars worth of investigating, the man who “leaked” the identity of Plame, Richard Armitage, was never charged with anything despite his status as the leaker being known to investigators early on.

So that begs the question: Why did the investigation continue beyond the point at which the “leaker’s” identity was known?  What possible reason could the special investigator, Patrick Fitzgerald, have to continue the investigation for years beyond achieving that investigation’s stated objective?

Well here’s one possible reason.  It turns out that Patrick Fitzgerald and Scooter Libby have butted heads before, and Fitzgerald apparently has no love for Libby.

As it happens, Messrs. Fitzgerald and Libby had crossed legal paths before. Before he joined the Bush Administration, Mr. Libby had, for a number of years in the 1980s and 1990s, been a lawyer for Marc Rich. Mr. Rich is the oil trader and financier who fled to Switzerland in 1983, just ahead of his indictment for tax-evasion by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bill Clinton pardoned Mr. Rich in 2001, and so the feds never did get their man. The pardon so infuriated Justice lawyers who had worked on the case that the Southern District promptly launched an investigation into whether the pardon had been “proper.” One former prosecutor we spoke to described the Rich case as “the single most rancorous case in the history of the Southern District.”

Two of the prosecutors who worked on the Rich case over the years were none other than Mr. Fitzgerald and James Comey, who while Deputy Attorney General appointed Mr. Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Mr. Fitzgerald worked in the Southern District for five years starting in 1988, at the same time that Mr. Libby was developing a legal theory of Mr. Rich’s innocence in a bid to get the charges dropped. The prosecutors never did accept the argument, but Leonard Garment, who brought Mr. Libby onto the case in 1985, says that he believes Mr. Libby’s legal work helped set the stage for Mr. Rich’s eventual pardon.

Now, say what you want about Libby defending a crap weasel like Marc Rich, but that’s what defense attorneys do.  And while that may not endear them to prosecutors or law enforcement types, it’s a necessary role.

And certainly not worthy of a vengeance-motivated prosecution at the hands of a grudge-carrying prosecutor.