The Libby travesty

Rich Lowry:

The perjury trial of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby is not exactly Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the case in the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House, which ruined everyone who came near it and dragged on for so long that people forgot what it originally had been about.

But it could ruin Libby’s life and Patrick Fitzgerald’s reputation, and it already feels like a kind of relic. The rationale for Libby’s trial steadily has evaporated since his indictment more than a year ago, but it still goes on.

Fitzgerald has proved himself the most clichéd of Washington types — the out-of-control special prosecutor. Such is human nature that almost no one has the strength to resist losing all sense of proportion once he has been loosed on the world as a special prosecutor, free to pursue any supposed violation of the law — no matter how peripheral — to the ends of the earth. Two events have highlighted the injustice of Fitzgerald’s prosecution.

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Lowry goes on to point out that the leak was by someone who was not charged and adds the light treatment of Sandy Berger into the mixed. Both are relevant arguments against this prosecution. There is a larger injustice her though. It is that Joe Wilson is not the one who is on trial. The man wrote a deceitful op-ed for the NY Times which triggered this investigation. He was using deceit while unjustly accusing the President of deceit and while trying to undercut our war effort in Iraq. He has had much more success than he deserves in playing a victim and starting the deranged Bush lied theme. An unrestricted cross examination of his conduct would render him defenseless.

Byron York points out the continuing problem of conflicting recollections by witnesses at the trial.