Ego and Prosecutorial Malpractice

Dick in Gardnerville, Nebraska. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Frigid dittos from the state of Nevada from a Marine —
RUSH: I said Nebraska, I’m sorry.
CALLER: — from the state of New Jersey —
RUSH: Hold — hold —
CALLER: 180 degrees from what it is now, and they had a cure for attention deficit syndrome during school hours. But I really called to talk about prosecutorial malfeasance because there is one, and I wanted to comment about it. Name’s Fitzgerald. Now, he’s gone untouched, unscathed, not a glove laid on him, and we have found out that in the first week he knew that Valerie Plame was not undercover and he knew where the leak came from, and thereafter he spent all of his time subject, you know, the executive branch, particularly the Oval Office with all kinds of, well, literally misleading the nation along with the media about where that leak came from.
RUSH: That?s a process crime. The original charge, no evidence to support that a crime was committed, so in the investigation you got a guy for perjury, obstruction of justice, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And people wondered why is this the case, and why does this happen? For one thing, Fitzgerald, you gotta remember who he is. He prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in 1995 successfully. He’s the US attorney for Chicago, currently going after a number of people there, including — what did I say, Fitzgerald? It’s Fitzpatrick. Yeah. No, it’s Patrick Fitzgerald. You’re thinking it’s Gerald Fitzpatrick. So the caller was right, staffer was wrong. It’s Patrick Fitzgerald. At any rate, he’s trying to put Conrad Black behind bars for some charges, I’m not sure, but the media love the guy because he was going after the administration. He’s protected, in terms of public image.

A lot of people are outraged about this, costing Scooter Libby millions and millions and millions to defend himself. Trial starts tomorrow, by the way, and one of the government star witnesses is going to be Tim Russert. Tim Russert is a star witness in this case. He is one of the media people, and there are going to be a bunch of them called, and they’re not crazy about this because they have to testify about some people who have been a confidential source. I think if I read this right, Russert is one of the key witnesses, his testimony will prove that Scooter Libby had lied. But, you’re right, the original leaker was known, it was Richard Armitage and that there was no crime because she wasn’t covert, and yet it went on. Why did it go on, that’s the real question people want to know. Why did it go on? All I can do is theorize here, Dick, but my theory is ego. The theory is that once you are given this great charge of independent counsel and special prosecutor, you have to have something at the end of the day to make it look like all the time you spent was worthwhile.
The worst thing an independent prosecutor, especially in this case, from his standpoint, would have been to say, ?You know, I looked at this, and nothing happened.? If he was going to do that, he would have had to do it in the first week or two when he knew the facts of the case. Once this thing dragged out for two years, it’s very hard to say, ?Well, you know, I knew two years ago there was really nothing here.? So there had to be something that comes out of it. That is just a wild guess, but that’s what I would attach to it. You can name a number of these guys, Ronnie Earle, who came up with a political indictment against Tom DeLay just to get him out of the leadership position of the Republican Party because the stupid Republicans had a rule saying if any one of them were ever indicted, they would quit, they would resign. Democrats don’t have such a rule, by the way.