In a piece in the April 7 Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution,
drew attention to revelations in a new book that ought to interest Illinoisans.
Judith Miller, you might recall, is the veteran New
York Times reporter caught up in the trial of former
Dick Cheney chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby,
on charges Libby obstructed justice, made a false statement and perjured
himself after unlawfully outing a covert CIA agent. Libby was convicted in part
on Miller’s evidence – evidence that Miller in her new memoir says she now
realizes was induced by the prosecuting attorney, who withheld critical
information and manipulated her memory as he prepared her to testify.
The 2007 case against Libby was dubious from the start – the
wrong man, a jury denied essential information, the meaning of a disputed phone
call. The prosecutor in the case, concludes Berkowitz, “threw sand in the eyes
of Ms. Miller and the American people, and in the gears of the U.S. legal
system.”
That prosecutor was Patrick Fitzgerald, crime-busting hero
of a hundred comic book editorials during his days as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.
The case Fitzgerald brought against William Cellini, for example, was no more
plausibly conceived or convincingly proven than that against Libby, as I
complained in the columns “Good and true”
and “Criminal
injustice.” Just as offensive to those who still like to think that the
Department of Justice cares about justice are the cases that the feds don’t
bring to court, as I tried to explain in “The
short arm of the law.”
The threats posed to the republic by its Libbys
and Cellinis pall in comparision to those posed by prosecutors like Fitzgerald
who (to quote Berkowitz about the Libby) “placed his quest for a conviction
above the search for truth and the pursuit of justice.”
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2015.
