\t\t\t\tSpecial prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spends two years investigating press leaks and comes away with nothing more than a face-saving indictment on a charge slightly more serious than jaywalking. <\/p>\n
There was no charge for any crime directly related to the disclosure of any secret identity or any misuse of classified information. The official in question, Scooter Libby, has resigned<\/a> and presumably a trial will follow on his alleged Clintonian Grand Jury behavior.<\/p>\n This is much less than the self-identified informed sources lead us to believe was coming, so the credibility of such people as Arianna Huffington, Larry O’Donnell, Markos Zuniga<\/a>, and Josh Marshall is nullified.<\/p>\n Fitzgerald says his investigation was “more serious than baseball” but fails to prove it. He’s from Chicago, and we know what that means. The Fifth Amendment takes a beating, as it did in the case of Clinton’s lies to the Grand Jury and Martha Stewart’s lies to the FBI. Why even ask questions that require the subject of the investigation to incriminate himself?<\/p>\n Even the mainstream media is not impressed by this outcome:<\/a><\/p>\n \nThe charges in the Friday indictment are similar to the ones used in Martha Stewart’s criminal case. She was convicted last year for obstructing justice and lying about why she sold ImClone Systems stock, just before a negative government decision on an ImClone drug. She served a five-month prison term followed by home confinement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is no Watergate, it’s one guy acting on his own, essentially a case of “nothing to see here, move along.”<\/p>\n What a waste of the taxpayers’ money.<\/p>\n UPDATE: It’s also worth noting, of course, that Scooter is innocent until proven guilty. What we actually have in the indictment is Scooter’s claim that he learned about Plame from a reporter, and Fitzgerald’s claim that he learned about it from Cheney. What if both are true? I would assume in that case that Scooter walks, and it’s not an unlikely scenario.<\/p>\n UPDATE 2: See the indictment here<\/a>. It’s pretty thin. See Jeff Goldstein<\/a> for a great link round-up.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spends two years investigating press leaks and comes away with nothing more than a face-saving indictment on a charge slightly more serious than jaywalking. There was no charge for any crime directly related to the disclosure of any secret identity or any misuse of classified information. The official in question, Scooter … Continue reading “Clinton, Stewart, and now Libby”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-Y7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}