HUFFINGTON
07.01-08.12
SQUELCHING SECRETS
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecution
of former CIA officer John Kiriakou for talking
to journalists about the Bush/Cheney torture
program has at least one thing in common with
his conviction of I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby
in 2007. ¶ In both cases, Fitzgerald went for the
little fish. But the big fish got away.
In the Plame case, Fitzgerald prosecuted Libby, then-vice president
Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, for
perjury and obstruction of justice
related to the leak of Valerie Plame
Wilson’s identity as a covert CIA
operative. But he stopped short of
charging Cheney or top presidential
adviser Karl Rove — both of whom
had been targets of his investigation.
Fitzgerald was appointed as a
special prosecutor in late 2003 to
investigate the July 2003 leak of
Plame’s identity, which came during a White House effort to discredit her husband, former U.S.
Ambassador Joe Wilson.
Wilson was trying to expose
how the administration had twisted intelligence to make its case
for the war in Iraq, launched a
few months earlier, and the White
House was desperate to prevent
that narrative from establishing
itself before the 2004 elections.
The evidence that came out at
trial clearly established that Cheney
was the first person to tell Libby
about Plame’s identity and that
Cheney wrote talking points that
likely prompted Libby and others to
raise Plame’s role with reporters.
Libby, before falsely claiming he
had heard about Plame from NBC
News host Tim Russert, told FBI
agents he might have discussed
Plame’s employment with reporters at Cheney’s direction.
In his closing arguments in the
Libby case, Fitzgerald famously declared: “There is a cloud over what
the vice president did that week.
… That cloud remains because the
defendant has obstructed justice
and lied about what happened.”
In a subsequent court filing,
Fitzgerald wrote that “there was
reason to believe” the leak had been
coordinated by Cheney and that the
vice president may have had a role
in the cover-up. “When the investigation began, Mr. Libby kept the