Poor Scooter, Part II
Bookworm on Mar 08 2007 at 9:17 am | Filed under: Crime and punishment, Democrats, Law, Republicans
One of the things that T.S. raised in my original Scooter post was that Fitzgerald said that it was wrong to disclose Plame’s identity. Now, as a lawyer, I can tell you that the fact that Fitzgerald said something doesn’t make it so. In fact, nothing a lawyer says is evidence, unless a lawyer’s actually testifying under oath. Until then, special prosecutor or not, it’s still his opinion. As to Plame and the Libby trial, my understanding has been and remains as a described by J. Peter Mulhern:
Diverging recollections about who said what when to whom about Joe Wilson’s wife are particularly useless as evidence of perjury because nobody had any motive to lie on the subject, least of all Scooter Libby. There was nothing criminal or dishonorable about discussing Valerie Plame’s identity or her job at the CIA with reporters or anyone else. There is no statute imposing criminal liability for such conversations. Patrick Fitzgerald’s unsupported assertions notwithstanding, there is no information in the public domain which even establishes that Valerie Plame’s employment at the CIA was classified.
It is a federal crime to transmit “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation” to any unauthorized person. 18 U.S.C. Section 793 (d). Valerie Plame’s identity might have been remotely related to our national defense but nobody has ever had any reason to believe that the information that she was a desk jockey at the CIA “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
It is a federal crime intentionally to reveal the identity of a covert intelligence agent when the government is taking affirmative steps to protect her identity. 50 U.S.C. Section 421. But Valerie Plame wasn’t a covert agent and the government wasn’t trying to protect her identity. There was never any prospect of a prosecution under Section 421.
Patrick Fitzgerald fulminated in court about a cloud over the Vice President in an effort to suggest that there was something dark and sinister about administration officials discussing Valerie Plame with reporters after her husband injected her into a national controversy. That suggestion is pure left-wing fantasy.
In sum, the evidence against Libby was that his memory of the sequence and details of perfectly innocent events of no great importance differed from that of other witnesses. The judge who let this case go to the jury is one or more of the following: a nitwit, a coward, and/or a partisan hack. The jury that convicted was prejudiced, stupid or both.
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2 Responses to “Poor Scooter, Part II”
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BW, the Mulhern essay sums up my feeling about the case perfectly.
I believe he also called for the President to fire Fitzgerald for prosecutorial misconduct. I wish the President had the stomach to do that. I thought that Fitzgerald tarnished himself and the case irrevocably with his first public statement about the indictment. He told bald faced lies to the public on that occasion, and never stopped right up to his post-trial statement. Patrick Fitzgerald meet Mike NiFong.
Now that the trial is over, I know of two jury members who have spoken publicly and revealed themselves to be exactly as Mulhern described the jury; i.e., either partisan hacks or too mentally challenged to judge anyone.
One other aspect of the trial has not been discussed publicly as far as I know. That is the competence of the defense. I know that Ted Wells is described as an excellent defense attorney. But, he certainly appeared to be off his game in this episode.
It is sad, but when the media and partisans scream for political blood real lives are damaged.
The only positive development so far is that despite the efforts of T.S. and others of like mind to glorify him, the media spotlight is now turned fully on Joe Wilson, and it reveals a rat who was skulking on the edge of the shadows. No satisfaction for Scooter Libby, however.
And again today (or last night, actually) another juror was on the box, one Anne Reddington, who told Chris Matthews that there was an ongoing investigation of the crime of releasing the name of an undercover operative, and they (jurors) wished it had been finished.
So here’s another built-in appeal: another juror who convicted Libby for something with which he was neither charged, nor on trial. She had no better understanding of what she was doing there than Denis Whoever does.
This is amazing to me. Libby was not charged with outing Plame (despite all the coverage we read to the contrary),and that is in fact not a crime in the eyes of anyone even if it had been the point! (If it were, we would now be speculating about the length of Armitage’s upcoming sentence.)
But,a long with a generally clueless press corps, we now have at least two jurors on the record testifying that they had no idea a) why they were there, or b) what they were doing, or c) what they were supposed to be considering.
I’d say a successful appeal from this mish-mash would be pretty close to inevitable.