Yup.
We don’t know the extent of the investigation into Blagojevich’s allegedly corrupt dealings. Have witnesses been brought before a grand jury? We don’t know. If so, who are they? We don’t know. What witnesses have been interviewed by FBI agents working for Fitzgerald? We don’t know. Do Fitzgerald and his investigators have any doubts about the truthfulness of those who have talked? We don’t know.
But we do know that something big is going on. “There is a lot of investigation that still needs to be done,” Rob Grant, who is the special agent in charge of the FBI office in Chicago, told reporters at the news conference announcing the Blagojevich charges last week. “There are critical interviews that we have to do and cooperation we need to get from different people.” At the same press conference, Fitzgerald himself added, “We have a tremendous amount of information gained from the wiretap and bugs that occurred over the last month and a half or so….One of the things we want to do with this investigation is to track out the different schemes and conspiracies to find out which ones were carried out or not and who might be involved in that or not. And that’s something we haven’t done yet. Now that we’ve gone overt, we’ll be interviewing people and figuring that out.”
One of the things Fitzgerald and his fellow prosecutors and FBI agents will be doing is trying to determine who is telling the whole truth and who is not. “There’s always a danger that people will make a mistake, get it wrong. There’s human frailty. They may also lie,” says Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney who was a vocal critic of Fitzgerald’s handling of the Plame affair. “Fitzgerald will try to do perjury traps, because that is what he does.”
As he notes, just remember the Plame case (also by Fitzgerald), where there was a conviction for perjury, with no underlying crime.
The conventional wisdom is that President Obama cannot fire/kick upstairs/whatever Mr. Fitzgerald on Jan 20.
But he could pardon Mr. Libby. And he could launch an ethics investigation into how Mr. Fitzgerald was trolling for perjury investigating a matter that he knew the answer to his satisfaction. Were it established that Patrick Fitzgerald was “out of control” on one thing, would this not call into question what he is doing on that other thing in Illinois?
Think of it, President Obama could “rid himself of this troublesome priest” as it were, and would folks on the Right now rise up in righteous wrath about correcting the injustice against Scooter Libby?
This is going to be a really colorfull 4 years.
Something about Fitzgerald reminds me of Eliot Spitzer. Makes me wonder if the former has some kind of fetish in his closet.
While Blagojevich et al deserve to be prosecuted, Libby did not and I don’t think Conrad Black did either. Fitzgerald is a dangerous man, corrupt in his overuse of prosecutorial power, and I suspect a future candidate for governor of Illinois. His behavior, like that of Giuliani, Scott Harshbarger and many others, is a function of perverse incentives created by our prosecutorial system and a strong reason to reform that system.