September 7, 2006
Plame Out Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:40 PM EST In his post of October 18, 2005, on the Plame affair, Joshua Zeitz wrote, “When all the facts are on the table, maybe John Steele Gordon and I will have occasion to revisit this question.” The facts would now seem to be mostly all out, so let’s do so. John F. Kennedy once said that in Washington, “where there’s smoke, there’s usually a smoke-making machine.” Plamegate is a classic case of an all-smoke-no-fire Washington kerfuffle. Twenty-five years from now, it will be totally forgotten. A brief review: In July 2003, Joseph Wilson IV, a retired ambassador who had been sent to Niger to see if there was any substance to the report that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy yellow cake (from which uranium is processed), wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times. In it he claimed that Bush’s statement in the 2003 State of the Union speech saying that Saddam had done so was false and that the Bush White House knew it to be false, because of Joe Wilson’s report. Shortly thereafter, Robert Novak revealed in his column that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. Wilson claimed that his wife’s cover had been blown as an act of revenge by the White House and violated the law against knowingly revealing intelligence officials who are under cover. All hell broke loose in the liberal media. The New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, howled for a special prosecutor, and one was duly appointed. Two years later, a New York Times reporter spent 85 days in jail for contempt for refusing to reveal her sources for a story that was never published. Soon after she was released, she was fired. Shortly thereafter, the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, indicted Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, for perjury in his grand jury testimony on the matter. Libby immediately resigned, and the case against him is still pending. That was it. After two years and millions of dollars, the special prosecutor obtained one indictment, and that alleged an ex post facto crime. To the palpable disappointment of the left, Karl Rove was not—in Joe Wilson’s words—frog-marched out of the White House. Now it turns out that Novak got his information from an inadvertent leak by Richard Armitage, then number two at the State Department and no friend of the Bush White House. More, Fitzgerald had known this from the very day he took office. Being an editorial writer, of course, means never having to say you’re sorry. But both the Post and the Times in recent editorials have come as close as editorialists seem able to come to say that they blew it. The Post said that the real fault for outing Valerie Plame lay with her husband, Joe Wilson. So who are the winners and losers here? Surely Joe Wilson is a big loser. His 15 minutes of fame came at the cost of his personal integrity, although there’s not much evidence that he ever had any. His original op-ed article was mostly false, as the report of the 9/11 Commission clearly demonstrated. He has been revealed as a combination showboating publicity hound and political hit man. Another is Richard Armitage. He could have fessed up as soon as he realized what he had done, and short-circuited the whole affair. Instead he did nothing, causing the government to needlessly spend million of dollars and distracting public officials from doing their jobs as they sought to defend themselves against serious, but specious, accusations. His behavior is, perhaps, explainable. If so, he should do so forthwith. Another is Patrick Fitzgerald. Had a regular Department of Justice investigation been carried out, it would have ended with the revelation in October 2003 that Richard Armitage was the leaker and he had committed no crime in doing so, however careless he had been. To be sure, the rabid left would have screamed “Cover-up!” for a few days, but even they would have had to shut up when all the facts were laid out. But once someone is appointed a “special prosecutor” and given a blank check both as to money and time to investigate a case that has gathered great public attention, they seem compelled to spend endless time and endless money searching for something, anything, to justify their appointment. The best that Fitzgerald could do, it seems, was indict a man for lying about a crime that had never taken place. Given the fact that that man, Scooter Libby, is both a lawyer and a total Washington professional, he must surely have known that a cover-up is a dangerous enterprise, and if there is no crime to cover up, why do it? Inevitably, then, one wonders how much evidence there is behind this indictment. Perhaps Scooter Libby is just Fitzgerald’s ham sandwich, indicted to bolster Fitzgerald’s reputation as a hard-boiled prosecutor. I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable from time to time in a democracy with a free press. But perhaps we can at least learn something from it. Let’s start with filing away the whole concept of special prosecutor with other well-intentioned public policy ideas that don’t work in the real world, such as prohibition.
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