""Watergate-level event" is about to occur in

by **Peachtree Pam** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 1:13 pm

dbeach, I can't understand that Fitz is going to let this scumbag off unless she has told him a LOT MORE than she is indicating...here is a nice summary from the blogger Billmon: The Miller's Tale I went out Saturday night and yesterday unfortunately was a household chore day, so I'm very late weighing in on the New Pravda's Judy Miller extravaganza. It was, as so many have already pointed out, rather less than the full disclosure the paper's politburo had promised. A whole lot less. In fact, it looks like the Gray Lady and Ms. Run Amok are both sporting a thick stubble on their faces, suspiciously resembling Tricky Dick's old five o'clock shadow. If this were 1973, we'd be talking about the "limited hang out road." But since it's 2005, let's settle for "cover up still in progress." Others have already sliced and diced the New Pravda's own feeble attempt to redeem its journalistic reputation, and made swiss cheese out of Miller's own first-person account -- which at crucial moments reads like the musings of an amnesia patient trying to make sense of a long-lost diary. ("My notes seem to indicate . . .") That being the case, I won't bother going over them in detail -- especially not the official history, which, with only a couple of exceptions, tells us nothing that matters that we didn't already know. It's hard to blame the reporters for that, given Miller's lack of cooperation, Fitzgerald's watertight investigation, and the New Pravda's own efforts to impose the party line on itself. But if this is Bill Keller's idea of a take-no-prisoners expose, then he'd probably be more at home running the New Pravda's P.R. department than running its newsroom (which is what a lot of us thought already.) Miller's story, on the other hand, may be duplicitous, but it's still useful, if only because it tells us some of the questions she was asked in front of the grand jury (which is why we now know that Fitzgerald has his harpoon gun trained on Moby Dick Cheney) and gives us a glimpse inside her reporter's notebook. But it also raises more questions than it answers, particularly when it comes to Miller's puzzling tango with I. Lewis Libby. There is, of course, no way of knowing if Miller told the grand jury the whole truth, and many reasons to suspect she did not. The very structure of her story is, in a sense, deceptive, since her chronological narrative follows the sequence of her sessions with Libby, and not the order in which she testified about them. This allows Judy to glide past questions about whether she mentioned the June 2003 meeting during her first encounter with the grand jury, or had it pointed out to her by Fitzgerald. At a minimum, the amnesia dodge indicates that Miller is still trying to protect someone -- or probably more accurately, trying to protect herself by protecting someone else. It's striking that Judy's explanation for why she can't identify the source of "Valerie Flame" (i.e. a bad memory) is identical with Karl Rove's explanation for why he can't identify the reporter who supposedly told him about Plame. I never realized amensia could be contagious. Miller's reluctance to vouch for the accuracy of her own notes suggests she's even still trying to protect Libby, despite the fact that he put her in a extremely awkward position by essentially suborning her to commit perjury. On the other hand, by providing detailed (albeit hearsay) evidence that Libby "feared" her testimony, Miller sank a huge nail into Scooter's reputational coffin, if not his legal one. I suppose this could be rationalized as a lesser betrayal, one necessary to protect what's left of Miller's own reputation by giving her a semi-plausible reason for spending 85 days in jail. But it wasn't the act of a woman who's willing to take a bullet for Scooter Libby. How to explain these cross currents? These are both deeply crooked people, and they still seem to be playing some kind of double game together, even though their interests are now in conflict. (Her testimony directly implicates Libby, meaning he has every reason to try to trash her credibility.) And yet Miller remains extremely reluctant to say explicitly what she obviously knows to be true -- that Libby brought up Plame at their very first meeting, and specifically tied her to the "bureau," the CIA's counter-proliferation arm. Why the shrinking violet act? Maybe it's just an excess of legal caution on the part of either Miller or the New Pravda. Or maybe Miller is simply trying not to deviate too much from her statement to Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman (one of the few useful items in the New Pravda's official history) that anything she learned about Valerie Plame came up in the course of "casual conversations" with administration officials rather than a "deliberate organized effort to put out information." But this, of course, raises the question of why she told that lie in the first place. Part of the problem is that while Libby's motives are plain -- he wants to stay out of prison -- Miller's are still obscure, at least to me. I keep circling back to the fundamental, but still unanswered, question: Was Judy acting as a reporter, a co-conspirator, an unwitting tool or just an inveterate gossip? You can build a scenario in which the question mark at the end of Judy's "wife works in bureau?" notation represented not a question but a suggestion from Libby that this was a bit of dirt Miller might want to check out. Libby may have figured that the best way to spread the story was to let Judy get a game of "telephone" going. Or maybe he didn't know all the details of Plame's identity and employment (or didn't want to know them officially) and tasked Judy with the job of ferreting them out. "Valerie Flame," then, might have been a name Judy brought to her second meeting with Libby, rather than one she took away from it. (I'm bad with names, too, so I'm not in a good place to criticize, but you'd think that in a case like that, where you're helping the necon Mafia trash somebody, you'd at least double check the spelling.) If such a scenario were true, one could easily understand why Scooter and Judy would prefer not to mention their June meeting in their initial remarks to the grand jury. This, however, also would have been extraordinarily stupid, since it turns out that Judy called on Scooter at his digs in the Old Executive Office building, where she would have had to have been logged in and out. Did that really not occur to them? These aren't stupid people, so it's hard to imagine that it didn't -- almost as hard as imagining that Patrick Fitzgerald didn't think to subpoena the OEO vistor logs. And yet we have it on reasonably good authority (Murray Waas) that Libby did indeed try to conceal the meeting, and that Fitzgerald didn't learn about it either, until after Miller discovered her "missing" notes. I don't know how to explain this. One possibility is that Waas is wrong (nobody's perfect) and Fitzgerald did know about the June meeting, but used it to set a perjury trap for Libby and/or Miller. Another possibility (one more favorable to Judy) is that she correctly read this passage in Libby's "aspen" letter: The Special Counsel identified every reporter with whom I had spoken about anything in July 2003, including you . . . as a request to keep mum about the June meeting. Mindful of the laws against perjury, she made sure she mentioned it to Fitzgerald, while at the same time (again the double game) being as economical with the truth as possible. The point, I guess, is that Miller's part in this conspiracy does not necessarily require her to have been an active, knowing participant. Libby may have understood that the conspiracy's aims could be attained simply by dropping an initial hint (wife works in bureau?) and then encouraging Judy to do what she does best -- pump her neocon sources for more. The fact that Judy's knowledge of Plame expanded from one meeting to the next suggests either that Libby was feeding her fresh meat or that she was checking back with him to see whether he could confirm things she had found out elsewhere. Either way, the picture that emerges is consistent with the basic conspiracy theory -- that the White House actively tried to plant stories about Joe Wilson's wife, either to punish him or to impune his credibility. Which is why Scooter Libby almost certainly will be indicted, and probably soon. But it doesn't say anything one way or the other about Miller's role, other than that Scooter obviously saw her as a hot prospect. Why, then, was there no sale? The most damaging evidence against Judy is that she never wrote a story about Plame or Joe Wilson, even though she claims she wanted to. The most logical editor for her to have approached about such a story (Jill Abramson) says she never did. (This has particularly nasty implications for the New Pravda's credibility, since it means that either its star reporter is lying, its former D.C. bureau chief is lying, or the editor who actually shot down Miller's story idea is laying low when he or she should be speaking up.) Miller doesn't make things better for herself by repeatedly contradicting her own testimony. For example, in her account of her July 8 meeting with Libby (which, remember, she testified about during her first grand jury appearance) Judy says "I believed that this was the first time I had heard that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for Winpac" -- the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control unit. But in her account of her June meeting with Scooter, Judy said that when he notes showed Libby mentioning that Plame worked for the "bureau," her impression was that "he had been speaking about a particular bureau within the agency that dealt with the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons." Winpac, in other words. Likewise, some of Miller's explanations for her own notes don't make a lick of sense -- like when she speculates that she may have intentionally used the name "Victoria Wilson" with Scooter in their third (and final) conversation, in hopes that he would correct and thus confirm the correct name. But her own notes show she already had the correct name (i.e. Valerie instead of Victoria.) It's also fairly odd that Judy claims she had previously only ever heard Joe Wilson's wife refered by her maiden name -- even though she can't remember where she heard that, when she heard it, or who she heard it from. None of these, ah, anomalies, prove Miller lied when she claimed she can't remember the details of her conversations with Libby or the names of any other official sources (cough, Rove, cough) with whom she discussed Valerie Plame. (This is yet another anomaly: If Libby never mentioned Plame's alleged role in her husband's Niger mission, why did Miller bother following up about her with other sources?) They also don't prove Judy was connected at the roots to the White House conspirators, although it sure looks like they scraped a lot of branches together. And finally, in a just world, these little inconsistencies wouldn't matter nearly as much as Miller's astounding revelation that her reports on Saddam's mythical WMDs were bound within the confines of an official Pentagon security clearance. But Sunday's little game of charades did pretty much blow away the New Pravda's propaganda campaign on behalf of Judy Miller, First Amendment martyr. And it certainly made a circus clown out of Bill Keller, who promised to give his readers the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Miller's involvement in Plamegate, just as soon as the lawyers would let him. At the moment, though, it looks like Gray Lady wouldn't recognize the truth if it came up and slapped her right in her five o'clock shadow. Posted by billmon at October 17, 2005 03:00 AM

by **dbeach** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 1:26 pm

PAM NICE LINK PLEASE I will shuffle off to buffalo and post some at DU Miller must sung like the operation mockingbird pen pal that she is . 25 yrs on the CIA account. .SO she sings ..the CIA who dislikes poppy o and the arrogant assassins and did'nt appreciate all the slander that Tenet allowed to their hard field work ..MUST be dropppin all kind sof info to Mr. Fitzgerald. And MAYBE the company is finally waking to the century old con job that is the bush legacy..a legacy of TREASON and Privlege AND ALLEGIANCE to genuine Nazis and satanists. CUZ that is family bush..satan worshipping Nazis.. capable of unimaginable crimes against humanity. .poppy o and his international gang bangers sold nukes to the enemies of the USA and many in govt aided and abbetted him. Its time to cleanse the Republic or be devoured by the bush nazi criminals

by **chiggerbit** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:04 pm

Well, well, well, take a look at Richard Clarke's new book. Reality as fiction? Check out my highlight at the bottom: <a href="http://www.samsclub.com/eclub/main_shopping.jsp?coe=0&oidPath=0%3A-23542%3A-23587%3A-37581%3A-37592%3A951272&mt=a&n=0">www.samsclub.com/eclub/ma...2&mt=a&n=0</a> <blockquote>Quote:<hr>The Scorpion's Gate By Richard Clarke Hardcover; Fiction, Thriller "Fiction can often tell the truth better than nonfiction. And there is a lot of truth that needs to be told." –Richard Clarke From the noted counterterrorism expert and #1 bestselling author comes an astonishing fiction debut – a novel of terrorism, warring nations, and political treachery… that could happen tomorrow. For three decades, Richard A. Clarke worked in the White House, State Department, and Pentagon. As adviser to four presidents, he traveled throughout the Middle East, visiting palaces, military bases, and intelligence centers, meeting rulers, soldiers, and spies. Some of what he found appeared in Against All Enemies. Much more of it appears here. In an extraordinary geopolitical thriller filled with the kind of cutting-edge authenticity only someone on the inside could bring, Clarke takes readers just five years into the future, when forces both in the Middle East and the United States are at work to launch another war. But this time, it could be bigger. This time, it could be nuclear, and spread to Asia and beyond. A coup has finally toppled the sheiks of Saudi Arabia, and put a determined but shaky Islamic government in its place. Everywhere, the scent of oil has begun to attract the scorpions, and among them are men in Washington and another capital ready to strike a devil's bargain to fundamentally realign the map of the Middle East. The plans are not the same, however – though some of the planners think they are. Hidden agendas, fierce ambition, conflicting loyalties, faulty intelligence, catastrophic miscalculation – soon the dominos will start to fall, and not even the efforts of a few dedicated men and women on the outside may be able to stop an unstoppable folly… Blending exceptional realism with intricate plotting, razor-sharp suspense, and a remarkable cast of characters, The Scorpion's Gate will be one of the most talked-about novels of the year. This product will be available October 25, 2005. Order now and we will ship it when it arrives. <hr></blockquote>

by **Peachtree Pam** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:08 pm

Her "security clearance" came from Rumsfeld. <a href="http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/10/about_judys_sec.html#more">thenexthurrah.typepad.com....html#more</a> October 17, 2005 About Judy's Security Clearance by emptywheel By now folks are zeroing in on one of the biggest bits of scandal to come out from NYT's story dump over the weekend. Judy claims to have some kind of security clearance. Judy tells us, In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment "embedded" with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons. This is not the first mention of Judy's security clearance. For a review of past mentions, go here. The short version? Judy has claimed to have clearance for quite some time. But there is some dispute about the nature or level of that clearance. So while I think the expressions of indignation and disgust and caution are appropriate reactions to news Judy had clearance, I think we also should consider closely the nature of that clearance. For a more detailed analysis of Judy's actions in Iraq, see my series on Judy's actions as an embed. In the last of those, I considered the nature of her embed. While Judy obviously had clearance to see things other reporters couldn't see, she also claimed to have restrictions placed on her reporting--restrictions no self-respecting journalist would accept. Under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials. Those officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted. They said they feared that such information could jeopardize the scientist's safety by identifying the part of the weapons program where he worked. [snip] While this reporter could not interview the scientist, she was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms program was buried. Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection. [emphasis mine] Judy claims this access/restriction balance gives her enough access to deem the story credible, while eliminating details the military finds important. But it doesn't seem like she has real top security access. If she did, she'd be able to do more than look at the scientist (I call him Yankee Fan) from afar. This would suggest those who question her top secret clearance are right. Except that in the weeks following this story, she does get access. It appears that Judy not only gets to meet Yankee Fan, she gets to accompany him on little adventures. Which suggests the restrictions placed on her were about managing how the story appeared (the timing and the details) rather than protecting security. Judy uses the excuse of limited access to shield precisely the details of this story that would uttterly discredit it. She does that again through her efforts to prevent other embeds from interviewing her unit. We have one opportunity to compare Judy's portrayal of her unit with the portrayal a, shall we say, more objective journalist would offer. In a May 11 article--an article which Judy seems to have tried to prevent--Barton Gellman profiles her unit. Throughout her articles, Judy only quotes from a few members of 75th XTF: Gonzales, McPhee, a DIA officer, and a few members who remain completely anonymous (who therefore could be one of these three people off the record). The rest remain silent, occasionally described, but never quoted. As a result, her stories feature a few carefully crafted heros (mostly Gonzales) with full commitment to and faith in the search for WMDs. In a May 9 article, Judy quotes Gonzales speaking in very measured tones about having had important evidence apparently removed in the past 48 hours. ''It is clear that in the past 48 hours, someone has removed many of the most critical items that we had hoped to salvage,'' said Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzalez, the team's leader. Contrast that with Gellman's article, which I describe in Part Five of my Judy series. Gellman quotes Gonzales speaking 4 days earlier, sounding much more human--and more discouraged: "Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in disgust to a colleague during last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and survey results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty." Judy had told members of MET Alpha that Gellman didn't have clearance to talk to them. But it's clear, here, that Judy wasn't trying to prevent the exposure of classified information. Rather, she was trying to hide how frustrated MET Alpha members were. She was trying to bury the doubts people were expressing about the hunt for WMDs. It appears, then, that whatever Judy's clearance status, it serves not to manage the release of classified information, but to put the best spin on the WMD hunt. Which is why one detail of Judy's embed must be stressed. It appears that Judy didn't go through normal channels--either to get assigned to a unit or to gain whatever security clearance she had. Rather, she went to Rummy. According to [Miller's Public Affairs officer] Pomeroy, as well as an editor at the Times, Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon—an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Although she never fully acknowledged the specific terms of that arrangement in her articles, they were as stringent as any conditions imposed on any reporter in Iraq. “Any articles going out had to be, well, censored,” Pomeroy told me. “The mission contained some highly classified elements and people, what we dubbed the ‘Secret Squirrels,’ and their ‘sources and methods’ had to be protected and a war was about to start.” [emphasis mine] Judy's embed rules (and presumably, security clearance) were not approved by military censors. Rather, they came from an agreement she personally struck with Rummy. I go into this in obssessive detail in my series on Judy. But based on her portrayal of 'Secret Squirrel' Yankee Fan and a few others, I'm fairly convinced the sources and methods Judy is hiding are details of veracity, not security. That is, Judy has clearance to report on staged stories. Her clearance is about reporting the details Rummy wants reported and hiding the really sketchy provenance for those stories. It has almost nothing to do with a real security clearance, with trying to prevent any info that would compromise national security from being released. (Although, this is probably more and more true of security clearances in BushCo--they're hiding their lies, not our vital truths.) All this doesn't not definitively explain which side of the security clearance issue Judy comes down on. Perhaps she does have clearance, but getting it was contigent on Judy writing precisely the stories they wanted her to write, on never questioning the stories she was given. Or perhaps she doesn't have clearance at all. When you deal entirely in fictions, why would you need clearance? One more thing. The nature of her embed suggests Rummy's personal involvement here. Is it possible he gave her "clearance" without going through the normal channels of clearing someone? That is, is it possible her clearance isn't clearance at all, just Rummy's carte blanche to circulate classified information? Fitz seems to know a bit about Judy's clearance. I wonder if he knows how she got that clearance?

by **Peachtree Pam** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 3:05 pm

Here is the link to billmon: <a href="http://billmon.org/archives/002263.html">billmon.org/archives/002263.html</a>

by **Peachtree Pam** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 3:10 pm

Hi Chig, He does have that talent for riding the wavem doesn't he? I hope this doesn't prove collusion with Fitz!

by **antiaristo** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:07 pm

Some more intelligent speculation from fdl <blockquote>Quote:<hr>There could be more than a dozen people indicted in this case. Fitz has vetted the WHIG, there are 20 or so people intimately connected with that group. They thought nobody would really "investigate" them... They figured some questions, everybody would lie, trash some records, and they would be back to business as usual. They were all questioned by the FBI, under the control of Rove's buddy John Ashcroft... The FBI records from those interviews are now recorded as evidence into the GJ record. Then Fitz started asking questions... Lying to the FBI is a crime. They were already... 1) Engaged in a criminal conspiracy 2) On the record lying about being engaged in a criminal conspiracy. We are talking like 20 top staffers, people like Condi Rice, Ari, McCellen... Hold on... I have a list: <a href="http://www.thinkprogress.org/lea...ak-">www.thinkprogress.org/lea...ak-</a> scandal#rove These people also have staff. Fitz walks in the door... And the conspiracy starts to really, really, feel heat... People are pressured to tell the truth... Which means admitting they already commited crimes... And one by one, Fitz has put their heads in a vise and squeezed their little criminal brains until they flipped. If they had the good sense to come clean early, Fitz would give a good deal and then they had to rat their friends... But while this was going on people like Scooty pants and Cheney were pressuring them to hold out... Stick to your story... And Fitz worked that too... The longer they stuck, the more charges were developed. Now methinks... They are _ALL_ busted... BIG TIME!!! Fitz has popped the ringleaders... Bush and Cheney are hanging out on a limb, sweating bullets, pissing pants, and crapping all over the floor... Now... suppose something bad happened... Suppose they outed an agent, who was killed in the line of duty working undercover at the CIA because Plames cover company was exposed... The CIA recently added a star in the lobby of the CIA building at Langly... Which means they lost an agent. And the conspiracy is liable for MURDER, and Fitz can both charge them for it, and prove it... Given the stature of this case, I fully expect that nothing less serious is coming down the pipeline. Me | Homepage | 10.17.05 - 1:22 pm | #<hr></blockquote> If you remember the trigger for Ashcroft's recusement was when FBI agents were suspicious of answers from Karl Rove, and Ashcroft got a briefing. This guy is probably right. That they all hanged themselves before Fitzgerald was appointed (Fitz must really have thought it was Christmas when he saw all the goodies).

by **Col Quisp** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:10 pm

Watergate is like a child's wading pool compared to this....exposions are imminent.

by **chiggerbit** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:27 pm

Yes, Peachy, he does. I hope it's not Clarke, though. He came across as so dedicated and unpolitical.

by **antiaristo** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:32 pm

The Prosecutor Never Rests Whether Probing a Leak or Trying Terrorists, Patrick Fitzgerald Is Relentless By Peter Slevin Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 2, 2005; Page C01 CHICAGO If Osama bin Laden ever stands trial, there's a prosecutor in Chicago waiting to face him down. As a driven young lawyer in the 1990s, Patrick J. Fitzgerald built the first criminal indictment against the man who would become the world's most hunted terrorist. Both men have moved on, you might say, but Fitzgerald still imagines that fantasy date before a judge. "If you're a prosecutor, you'd be insane if you didn't want to go do that," Fitzgerald says in the well-appointed conference room of the U.S. attorney's office here. "If there was a courtroom and they said someone has to stand up and try him, would I hesitate to volunteer? No. I'm not saying I'd be the best person to try him at that point, but I'd be lying if I told you I wouldn't be interested." A solidly built former rugby player who enjoyed getting muddy and bloody well into his twenties, Fitzgerald is nothing but confident in his own skin. Just as he does not fear bin Laden, he seems to fret little that he is now tangling simultaneously with the Bush White House and the New York Times, two of the nation's most powerful and privileged institutions. Fitzgerald, 44, is the special prosecutor investigating the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak. The gifted son of an Irish doorman makes no bones about challenging the establishment. His office is also prosecuting former Illinois governor George Ryan and loyal associates of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley on influence-peddling and corruption charges. He sees his task as getting to the bottom of things in ways as creative as the law allows. The law doesn't say you can't question a sitting president about his contacts or an investigative reporter about confidential sources. So Fitzgerald has done both, including quizzing Bush for more than an hour in the White House last June. His assiduous demands for answers from journalists alarms critics who believe he has created the greatest confrontation between the government and the press in a generation. The Times editorial page has hammered Fitzgerald, saying that "in his zeal to compel reporters to disclose their sources, Mr. Fitzgerald lost sight of the bigger picture." His demand that Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper be forced to testify prompted the paper to call the case "a major assault" on relationships between reporters and their secret sources, the very essence of reporting on the abuse of power. Fitzgerald is too politic to talk back, at least before he has wrapped up the case. A federal appeals panel in Washington is due to rule any day on whether the reporters must testify, and his work on the leak investigation is not done. But he appears to wonder what the fuss is all about. He says freely that he is zealous, a term he translates as passion within limits. James B. Comey, deputy attorney general and unofficial president-for-life of the Pat Fitzgerald Booster Club, says no high-profile prosecutor ever provided less evidence that he was "doing something wacky." "What's been interesting is seeing the media accounts and the columnists portray him as some sort of runaway prosecutor. That makes me smile," says Comey, who is largely responsible for Fitzgerald getting the Plame assignment. "Because there is no prosecutor who is less of a runaway than this guy." The Untouchable Fitzgerald frequently makes crime-fighting headlines in Chicago, where he took over the U.S. attorney's office just 10 days before 9/11. What's surprising is that he got the job at all. A New Yorker born and bred, Fitzgerald knew hardly a soul in Chicago, which was precisely the idea. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (no relation) was looking for an outsider to battle the state's notoriously corrupt political apparatus. The recently retired Illinois Republican tells a story about back in Al Capone's day, when Col. Robert McCormick, the imperious publisher of the Chicago Tribune, called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and demanded that he send someone to Chicago who could not be bought. Hoover sent the untouchable Eliot Ness. Now, as then, the U.S. attorney's job has the gloss of patronage. The late Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley used to say the U.S. attorney in Chicago is one of the three most important people in the state, and Peter Fitzgerald said he wanted "someone who couldn't be influenced either to prosecute someone unfairly or protect someone from being prosecuted unjustly." So the senator, who as the state's senior Republican had the right to recommend a candidate to the White House, went to one of Hoover's successors for advice. "I called Louis Freeh and said, 'Who's the best assistant U.S. attorney you know of in the country?' He said, 'Patrick Fitzgerald in the Southern District of New York.' " The senator then called Mary Jo White, who ran the New York office. Same question. Same answer. At the time, Patrick Fitzgerald was trying suspects in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He thought the call from a senatorial aide was a practical joke by one of his buddies. But as soon as their interview was over, the senator knew he had his man. "I thought, 'He is the original Untouchable,' " Peter Fitzgerald says. "You could just see it in his eyes that he was a straight shooter. There were no levers that anyone had over him. He had no desire to become a partner in a private law firm. He has no interest in electoral politics. He wanted to be a prosecutor." World Class For years, Fitzgerald has avoided receiving mail at his apartment because of the threat of a letter bomb from one murder-minded defendant or another. The staff of the 9/11 commission called him one of the world's best terrorism prosecutors. He convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and all four defendants in the embassy bombings, which had left 224 people dead. He extracted a guilty plea from Mafia capo John Gambino and became an authority on bin Laden, whom he indicted in 1998 for a global terrorist conspiracy that included the African bombings. "His thoroughness, his relentlessness, his work ethic are legendary," says terrorism expert Daniel Benjamin, a former member of the National Security Council. Seeing Fitzgerald in action, says Los Angeles lawyer Anthony Bouza, a college classmate, is "like watching a sophisticated machine." Colleagues speak in head-shaking tones of Fitzgerald's skills in taking a case to trial. A Phi Beta Kappa math and economics student at Amherst before earning a Harvard law degree in 1985, he has a gift for solving puzzles and simplifying complexity for a jury. He's no slouch at stagecraft, either. At the trial of a Mafia hit man, the defense argued that a ski mask -- part of what Fitzgerald called a "hit kit" that included surgical gloves, a gun and hollow-point bullets -- was really just a hat. (The defense also said the surgical gloves were for putting ointment on the defendant's ailing dog.) During closing arguments, Fitzgerald startled the jury by rolling up one leg on his lawyerly dark suit. "These are just shorts, ladies and gentlemen," he said, according to one account. "These are just shorts." Into the Scrum People who know Fitzgerald describe him as anything but a stuffed shirt. During a key moment in one New York trial, he slipped a note to his co-counsel, who interrupted questioning to read it to himself. It said, "Is there beer in the fridge?" Fitzgerald's parents, born on opposite sides of Ireland's County Clare, met in the United States. They raised their son in Flatbush and guided him to a scholarship at a Jesuit high school. He worked as a school janitor in Brooklyn to make money for college and spent summers opening doors at an upscale co-op building on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. (His father worked at a building on East 75th, just off Madison Avenue.) It is part of Fitzgerald lore that he bit his tongue when rich apartment dwellers talked down to him as "just the doorman." After law school, he spent three years in private practice before fleeing to the prosecution side. In the New York days, his married friends chided him about his workaholic, overachieving, hopelessly bachelor life. One time, visiting the small Brooklyn studio where Fitzgerald lived, a lawman noticed papers piled on the gas stove. Don't worry about the fire hazard, Fitzgerald told him -- "I've never turned it on." "The advantage he had over me," Comey says, "was he was much smarter and he had no life. He could sit there and never go home. Fitz would go in there and just sit and read through files. It would almost be as if he was photographing them." Fitzgerald did get out to exercise, and he even learned to scuba dive, an image his friends still cackle about. "I'm certified as a scuba diver, but I can't really swim," Fitzgerald explains. "I'm very good at sinking." Above all, Fitzgerald, who is 6 feet 2 and weighs 215 pounds, played rugby, a sport defined by toughness and camaraderie. He played at Amherst, at Harvard, and for several years in Manhattan. "You get every stress out of your system. You kick the ball, catch the ball, tackle, be tackled. At the end of the game, there's no unspent energy left. I did get bloodied a fair amount." He adds, "That was not the goal." 'Nice Place' Fitzgerald is careful to be apolitical in his targets and his public life alike. He registered to vote as an Independent in New York, only to discover, when he began receiving fundraising calls, that Independent was a political party. He re-registered with no affiliation, as he did later in Chicago. He spit fire last year when reporters asked whether the racketeering indictment of Muhammad Hamid Khalil Salah, a fundraiser for the Islamic militant group Hamas, was timed to boost President Bush's reelection campaign. The case was trumpeted first by Attorney General John Ashcroft. "I am not running for an election. I'm not part of a political party," Fitzgerald said at the time. "The election is irrelevant to this case. The reason we brought this case now is we're ready to proceed." Nor has Fitzgerald signaled where his own ambitions lie. He insists that he has already advanced further than his imaginings, but he is clearly aware of his emerging star status. Asked about the notion of becoming FBI director after Robert Mueller, another prosecutor who quit private practice to put bad guys behind bars, he laughs. "That's probably Director Mueller when he's having a bad day, trying to unload it on somebody else." He did not say he was uninterested, just that he is not thinking beyond his current job. In the high-profile Chicago job, he still works killer hours and he chairs the attorney general's advisory panel on terrorism. And while he will not publicly discuss details of love, politics or religion, others say his social life has improved, along with his apartment. "It's a really nice place. My wife walked in and said, 'I know Pat's got a girlfriend,' " says Comey. "Fitz wouldn't know eggshell from burnt orange, but he's got a life." Fitzgerald says he remembers where he came from and pinches himself when he realizes where he is. "I'm very indebted to my parents. They were very hardworking, straight, decent people. The values we grew up with were straight-ahead. We didn't grow up in a household where people were anything but direct," Fitzgerald says. "I'm hoping that if you're a straight shooter in the world, that's not that remarkable." 'Off Course'? Try telling that to the publisher of the New York Times. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., defending his reporters, blasted Fitzgerald and said, "The government's investigation into the Valerie Plame case has moved dangerously off course." Not only has the liberal editorial page sliced into Fitzgerald, but conservative columnist William Safire called Fitzgerald a "runaway Chicago prosecutor" and warned that a pair of his investigations are "this generation's gravest threat to our ability to ferret out the news." President Richard Nixon kept an enemies list and waged an epic fight over the publication of the Pentagon Papers, settling only when the Supreme Court backed the right of The Washington Post and New York Times to publish. Not a few presidents have tried, usually fruitlessly, to identify leakers and punish the reporters all too glad to publish those leaks. But Fitzgerald has ignored the old saw about arguing with someone who buys ink by the barrel. In both the Plame case and an unrelated terrorism investigation, he is trying to force Times reporters to reveal their confidential sources, a quinella not attempted in modern memory. "In all his cases, Pat keeps the blinders on and goes forward to where the facts lead him," says David Kelley, the acting U.S. attorney in New York and former head of the Justice Department's 9/11 Task Force. "He is not influenced by anything except by those things that ought to influence him. I wouldn't call it zeal. I would call it courage." Many legal experts say Fitzgerald has the law on his side in the Plame investigation. The Supreme Court ruled narrowly in 1972 that reporters could be required to testify to a grand jury if the prosecutor proved a legitimate need. Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan backed Fitzgerald and ordered Miller and Cooper to testify. Fitzgerald's tactics are not "a fishing expedition or an improper exercise of prosecutorial authority," he said. Zeal or courage? Where one side sees dangerous meddling, another sees creativity. The divergent takes are evident in the Plame investigation, a quest to find out who leaked her name and why. Faced with confidentiality pledges that reporters consider sacrosanct, Fitzgerald got one source, vice presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby, to grant journalists a limited release from their confidentiality pledge. Reporters, including two from The Washington Post, ultimately answered a narrow list of questions regarding their conversations with Libby. One Fitzgerald backer called it "elegant thinking that I would expect from him." But some journalists worried that a secret source brave enough to expose wrongdoing could now be pressured by prosecutors to reveal his cooperation with reporters. Even more troubling to many press analysts is Fitzgerald's effort to review the telephone records of Miller and fellow Times reporter Philip Shenon in another case. The prosecutor wants to know how the Times learned of the impending search of two Islamic charities then under investigation by Fitzgerald's office. The Times called the charities for comment, allegedly alerting them to the raid, Fitzgerald says. In a recent court hearing, Fitzgerald told U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet that he is sensitive to First Amendment concerns. He said the reporters are not his targets: "We want to find out who leaked national security information." Times attorney Floyd Abrams countered, "If we start down the road of permitting a federal prosecutor to obtain secret information without which journalists cannot function, the world will change for the worse because confidential sources will no longer be available." The Chicago Tribune, which has cheered Fitzgerald's crime-fighting energy, published a Jan. 23 editorial titled "Mr. Fitzgerald, Back Off." It called his pursuit of the reporters "a direct affront" to the First Amendment rights of the free press. Of the prosecutor's assertions of sensitivity, the paper scoffed, "That's rubbish." Playing Hardball "Do I have zeal? Yes. I don't pretend I don't," Fitzgerald says. "As a prosecutor, you have two roles: Show judgment as to what to go after and how to go after it. But also, once you do that, to be zealous. And if you're not zealous, you shouldn't have the job. Now sometimes 'zealous' becomes a code word for overzealous and I don't want to be overzealous. I hope I'm not." Media advocacy circles are not the only places where Fitzgerald's enthusiasm has been noted with alarm. In an unusually bitter fight that surfaced in late January, Fitzgerald drew angry criticism from a Chicago federal judge who said one of Fitzgerald's attorneys improperly delivered secret grand jury material to a private attorney in a civil case. U.S. District Judge James F. Holderman demanded an investigation of Fitzgerald and several prosecutors. Fitzgerald blazed back, charging in an unusually pointed brief that the judge had "displayed a disturbing lack of objectivity." He accused him of "petty harassment" of prosecutors and asked an appeals court to remove the judge from the case because of a conflict of interest involving his wife. The question of zeal surfaced yet more prominently in two Chicago terrorism cases -- investigations into the Global Relief and Benevolence International foundations, which inspired a less than flattering analysis by the 9/11 commission staff. The staff report last year said the federal government's treatment of the two charities raised "substantial civil liberty concerns" and revealed a critical difference between asserting "links" to terrorists and proving concrete support. In the case, Fitzgerald again had the backing of Ashcroft, who jetted to Chicago in October 2002 with a media contingent in tow and vowed to halt "the source of terrorist blood money." But the trial judge and the 9/11 commission staff concluded that Fitzgerald failed to prove that Enaam Arnaout, the Benevolence executive director, had provided financial support to al Qaeda, as the indictment had alleged. A federal judge, referring to the prosecution's evidence, said the defendant appeared primarily a victim of guilt by association. On the day the trial was to begin, Arnaout pleaded guilty to a fraud charge. Judge Suzanne Conlon made clear in ordering Arnaout to prison for 11 years that he had not been convicted of a terrorism crime. Fitzgerald said in the interview that he is not disappointed by the plea bargain that ended the case, only by what he considers Arnaout's later failure to tell what he knows. Of Conlon, he said, "She thought we hadn't connected the dots. I thought we had." "When you're a pitcher, you throw the ball over the plate and if you think you threw a strike and the umpire says it's a ball, it doesn't matter how much you think it's a strike. You put your case on. You don't walk into court out of fear that when you do it, either a judge will disagree with some of what you say or a defense attorney will call you overzealous."

by **dbeach** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:34 pm

childs wading pool was watergate how about watergate conspirators are Heaven bound some day as for plame gate what is the opposite of HEAVEN I am asking SANTA for a big big big gift this yr.. The murderers of JFK whom I think some are still alive and one is a certain ex-pres and ex CIA chief. COMEON SANTA been such a goo boy this yr.. Remember my dream back in JULY was bush jr got arrested..?? My dreams have been known to come true.

by **dbeach** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:46 pm

Check tis out.."The late Pope John Paul II named St Thomas More as the patron saint of statesmen and politicians ,adding to Mores eminence as patron of lawyers [on 10/31/0<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/alien.gif ALT="0]"> ."' reading from college brochure.. My kid is attending Thomas More College and the major is Political Science. So I will double my prayers for Justice in an unjust system lil humor intended.

by **Col Quisp** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:51 pm

Dream Send! May your dreams come true, dbeach! You are a good egg.

by **dbeach** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 10:22 pm

DU is now saying Raw story is gonna break soemthing big tonight madsen BTW is all but banned at DU after eferring thousands there for some time now.. <a href="http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/">www.waynemadsenreport.com/</a> 'October 17, 2005 -- Official Washington remains tense in anticipation of indictments being returned against senior White House officials as a result of the CIA leak investigation by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The Grand Jury is due to reconvene on Wednesday, October 19, however, it is not known when "bills" may be returned in the case that is centered around Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Ari Fleischer, and Dick Cheney. In a Grand Jury, a bill is an indictment. A "no bill" is a determination by the Grand Jury that there is insufficient evidence to support an indictment. There is already talk of who will replace Rove and Libby if they resign following indictments. Given his close ties to Cheney, Douglas Feith's replacement as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans Eric Edelman is rumored to be a top candidate to replace Libby as Cheney's Chief of Staff. Top candidates to replace Rove include State Department International Public Diplomacy Assistant Secretary of State Karen Hughes and long time GOP adviser Mary Matalin. However, given the close ties of all these potential candidates to the current scandal, other observers believe the White House will come under pressure to completely clean house, especially if Cheney is named as an unindicted co-conspirator or if he is actually indicted outright. In that event, look for new players from the GOP "moderate" wing to come into the White House and Cabinet in senior positions. Names mentioned include former Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci, former RNC Chairman and Montana Governor Marc Racicot, former Florida Senator Connie Mack, former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, former Michigan Governor John Engler, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, and former California Governor Pete Wilson. Also, look for an increased advisory role for former President George H. W. Bush. CIA case Expands to Pentagon It has also been revealed that New York Times reporter Judith Miller was granted a Secret Department of Defense clearance while she was embedded with a U.S. military unit in Iraq searching for weapons of mass destruction (weapons that were non-existent). Although the identification of Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA agent (contained in a State Department memorandum carried aboard Air Force One on a trip to Africa in July 2003) was classified Secret, Miller would not have had a need to know for that information. "

by **chiggerbit** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 10:40 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>In that event, look for new players from the GOP "moderate" wing to come into the White House and Cabinet in senior positions<hr></blockquote> Not going to happen. One of GHW's proclivites is vengence. He is not going to like being dissed like this, and he will get even. Look for even more polarizing reich-eous replacements.

""Watergate-level event" is about to occur in

St Judith

Re: St Judith

Re: Clarke

St Judith's security clearance

dbeach

Timely "fiction?"

Re: ""Watergate-level event" is about to occu

Re: ""Watergate-level event" is about to occu

Re: Timely "fiction?"

A Biography of Our Hero

Re: Timely "fiction?"

Lawyers Saint

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madsen

Re: madsen

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