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Jewish World Review Nov. 1, 2005 / 29 Tishrei, 5766 The cult of Fitzgerald By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Who knew that a special prosecutor working to nail high
government officials on perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges
would become a media and Democratic hero? It's not the 1990s
anymore.
CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is celebrated by the
press and Bush haters everywhere. He is hailed for his no-nonsense
style, his down-to-earth Brooklyn accent, his probity, his
zealousness upholding the rule of law, and his willingness to hunt
down lies no matter how high it takes him in the Washington food
chain. "All my friends want to date him," a young liberal woman
tells me.
But the very qualities that are so endearing about a special
prosecutor circa 2005 would have been damnable circa 1995. It goes
to show that when you're a special prosecutor, the quality of your
work is not as important as the decade you do it in. Had Fitzgerald
suffered the misfortune of being asked to investigate any of the
Bill Clinton scandals, he would likely have emerged bruised and
battered, with a reputation as an out-of-control fanatic.
Fitzgerald has a black-and-white view of the world. So did
Clinton-era independent counsel Ken Starr. Fitzgerald is, by all
counts, personally upright. So is Starr. He takes lying under oath
seriously. So did Starr. He is willing to pursue perjury allegations
even when there is not an underlying crime. So was Starr. The
difference is that Starr was arrayed against a White House that
declared war on him, his staff and his investigation.
Fitzgerald and Starr aren't exact duplicates. Fitzgerald is an
experienced prosecutor. Starr wasn't. But this actually worked in
the Clinton White House's favor, since a hard-bitten prosecutor
treating the president like any other suspect — a prosecutor like
"Fitzy" in other words — might have been more effective and
ruthless. Fitzgerald's prosecution has also been leak-proof. Starr's
wasn't, although many of the leaks attributed to his office came
from Clinton spinners seeking both to get out bad news early and to
discredit Starr for leaking.
In contrast to Fitzgerald, Starr's uprightness was used against
him, to prove that he was a hopeless stiff. That he tried to engage
in standard prosecutorial methods — like flipping low-level
witnesses against their superiors, a favored Fitzgerald tactic that
liberals hope he is attempting in this case — was taken as evidence
of his extremism. He was accused of being "obsessed with sex," when
he had no say in whether Clinton decided to have sex with an intern
and lie about it (surely, he would have advised against it). This
would be like accusing Fitzgerald of being perversely "obsessed with
secrecy," since he is investigating the mishandling of classified
material.
President Bush has inflicted no indignities on Fitzgerald, whose
investigation he has in fact called "dignified." The administration
actively eased the prosecutor's work by having top officials sign
waivers of their confidentiality agreements with reporters. As
National Review reporter Byron York has pointed out, far from
assisting Starr, Clinton officials entered into joint-defense
agreements, a maneuver often used by defendants in mob cases.
Of course, the politics of scandal in Washington is a movable
feast of hypocrisy, shifting every decade depending on which party
controls the executive branch. Liberals loved special prosecutors in
the 1980s; then many conservatives adopted them in the 1990s; now
the left adores the criminalization of politics once again. But it
is especially unseemly to see the same people who pooh-poohed
President Clinton's repeated perjuries in 1998 suddenly worked up by
a few alleged lies under oath by a vice president's chief of staff.
What happened to getting on with the business of the country?
With the exception of a feint by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison,
which she immediately regretted, and few other wobbles, at least
conservatives haven't contradicted their core contention from the
1990s that lying under oath is a serious crime. In this, they
finally have some company from liberals, who also have a strange,
newfound affection for relentlessly truth-seeking prosecutors.
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
