Tuesday, November 01, 2005
St. Fitzgerald Not So Saintly?
Simbaud has a nice summary of the Fitzgerald second-guessing and third-guessing that's been all the rage on the liberal blogs:
For my part, I have always been a Fitzgerald investigation realist (see for example, the third comment in this thread from a week or so before the Libby indictment) but would certainly love to be wildly wrong on this one...
And for that matter: are there more indictments to come, or does Mr. Fitzgerald plan to fold up his tent? Billmon was (we believe) the first to cry "whitewash" after the dismissal of the grand jury on Friday, followed shortly thereafter by ex-prosecutor Sheldon Drobny ("Those of us locally in the know here do not agree that Mr. Fitzgerald is as independent as the press has made him out to be"). If Michael Isikoff's Newsweek article is true, and Fitzgerald visited President Bush's personal attorney on Friday "to tell him the president's closest aide would not be charged," then, as Digby puts it, Fitz is in the tank.
But Jane Hamsher points out that Isikoff's "scoop" almost certainly originated with Rove's attorneys, and she'll believe it when she can gaze at the clouds and see a flock of pigs winging their way back from Capistrano. (Swopa points out that Mr. Isikoff has published numerous accounts of airborne porkers before.) And at the Booman Tribune, former SEC enforcement official Marty Aussenberg argues that Fitz is just warming up:[T]he real reason to lay out as much factual detail as he did [in the indictment] was for Fitz to show the world (and in particular, the world within the White House) that he has the goods, and that he won't hesitate to drop the dime on some additional malefactors, particularly, Cheney.Aussenberg's argument is so powerful that it pretty much sways Billmon, which is, we think, more or less where we came in.
For my part, I have always been a Fitzgerald investigation realist (see for example, the third comment in this thread from a week or so before the Libby indictment) but would certainly love to be wildly wrong on this one...
