Patrick Fitzgerald Revealing Shady Administration Practices

[Catherine Vincent]

Here is a good article on Pat Fitzgerald's actions...

Fitzgerald revealing shady administration practices
by Linda P. Campbell, Columnist
Friday, April 21, 2006

(KRT)—Patrick Fitzgerald is my hero. Not because he’s pursuing Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff or because he’s making the White House squirm over its distinction between good and bad leaking of government secrets. It’s because Fitzgerald is forcing this administration to confront its shadowy conniving. And he’s doing it out in public, without leaks or whispers, by simply doing his job in pursuing a criminal case.

That’s not to suggest that Fitzgerald doesn’t understand exactly what he’s putting out for public consumption. But he’s laying out his findings without agenda or vendetta, letting the facts take us where they take us.

The April 5 court filing that pointed to President George W. Bush and Cheney as authorizing Scooter Libby to leak intelligence information about Iraqi weapons to Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, carried the mundane header “Government’s response to defendant’s third motion to compel discovery.”

On one level, it was a routine filing for a criminal case. The defendant’s lawyers ask for the moon and every document they can get, ostensibly to prepare their client’s defense but in reality to divert attention from the specific charges and to swamp prosecutors.

more---->http://www.uecrescent.org/articles/stories/public/200604/21/0003XXpp_opinion.html

Fitzgerald is everyone's hero! Except the kool aid drinking republicans, that is. :)


:loveya:

[rodeodance]

1. 2006 Knight Ridder Tribune

The prosecution responds with objections to a fishing expedition, explains that it already has turned over voluminous discovery and pointedly argues why the defense is not entitled to other items it seeks.

Except in this case, the 39-page motion contained intriguing detail about Libby’s grand jury testimony regarding his July 8, 2003, discussion with Miller about an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate involving Iraq’s weapons acquisition attempts. According to the court filing, Libby told the grand jury that he was authorized to talk about the then-classified NIE by Bush through Cheney. The document wouldn’t be officially declassified until later.

This disclosure prompted Bush to at least acknowledge that he ordered the NIE declassified to bolster his arguments about Iraq’s weapons threat. But neither he nor Cheney has yet owned up to behind-the-scenes efforts to discredit administration critic Joseph Wilson.

We might not have the ammunition to demand to know why, if it was so important for the public to know information that the president and vice president found it expedient to secretly declassify, they were not countering their critics in the open. Why was a White House operative instead skulking to clandestine meetings with reporters, hiding behind the confidence that they wouldn’t unmask him?

What we do know is this case has shone a light into the White House, and the view isn’t pretty at all.

© 2006 Knight Ridder Tribune

[Catherine Vincent]

2. Kick!

[madrchsod]

3. the ryan case in illinois is the

case he will use to nail the boys and girls in washington. i hope this time he checks the background of the jury pool

[Catherine Vincent]

4. The only thing I worry about is the Ryan case took 9 years to crack open.

I hope it doesn't take that long for these crooks in Washington.