After Martha Stewart was convicted for saying she was innocent of a crime, which could not be proved, many saw this as the test-case for allowing prosecutors free reign to employ any and all manners of Stalinesque prosecutorial techniques. Stewart was deemed �guilty� of a non-crime for essentially saying she wasn�t guilty. Is it no longer acceptable to defend oneself? In Martha�s case, it most certainly appeared not. However, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald advised that he supported the case against Ms. Stewart. Apparently, Fitzgerald is a backer of creativity in the law. 

Attorney and co-author of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, Victoria Toensing, said of Fitzgerald�s �Plame-gate� case:  �If you don't have a clear violation, you should not become what's called �creative with the law�. I don't think you're supposed to be creative with the criminal law. I call it fitting the stepsister's foot into Cinderella's shoe.� Toensing advised that there was no violation of the 1982 Act. Toensing further quoted the Chicago Tribune, which had written in February: �Probably Fitzgerald's greatest talent was finding creative ways to interpret the law.� In regards to Fitzgerald�s Lewis Libby indictment (and/or any others to come), this well-known Fitzgerald creativity strongly appears to be the case. 

Please don�t misunderstand me.  Obstruction of justice and perjury are serious crimes.  But, we�re not even certain that these charges are either warranted or accurate.  However, attaching additional �crimes� to an underlying �crime� that has already been dropped seems baseless at best.  At its worst, it smacks of �we used the pretense of an underlying crime to put you into the hot seat�so that we could go on a fishing expedition and try to get you to make inconsistent statements�.  And at his over-an-hour press conference on Friday, Fitzgerald seemed determined to keep Karl Rove and others �on the hook�.  Fitzgerald refused to answer mainstream media reporters who continued to breathlessly salivate, while asking if he still had plans to investigate and/or indict Rove.  Fitzgerald coyly refused to answer.  However, during his press conference, Fitzgerald did manage to make Libby sound more like an axe murderer than someone who had (possibly inadvertently) contradicted his statements.

Note:  In a legal system already rampant with activist judges performing legislative duties, to say that our �legal� system has gone wild is a cosmic understatement.

Fitzgerald said that he had charged the now former VP Chief of Staff Lewis Libby with obstruction of justice, making false statements and perjury because �we didn't get the straight story.� When asked why he didn�t charge Libby with the �outing� of former CIA covert agent Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald said that he didn�t know if a �serious national security crime� had been perpetrated. Silly me and others.  I�d thought that the outing-crime might have actually been the reason the investigation began, in the first place. Whew!!!  After almost 2 years, the special prosecutor still doesn�t know if a real crime was committed or not? 

Note: Again it appears that for politicians �innocent until proven guilty� applies only to Democrats�not to Republicans or conservatives.

When Fitzgerald was asked by reporters why he had not charged anyone with the outing-crime, he gave the baseball analogy:  �What we have when someone charges obstruction of justice is the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure out what happened, and somebody blocked their view.� Hmmm. Not to argue with the special prosecutor, I�d still like to know what real crime he believes was �being obstructed�. From what Victoria Toensing says, no crime was ever committed.  As she wrote the 1982 Act upon which this investigation was purportedly begun, she should know. 

So, I have to wonder if this case was and is being made up as it goes along and more people are questioned. However, with no crime having been committed, I�m increasingly uneasy about true motivations. Is it simply that the special prosecutor believed that after 2 years he had to come up with some cause of action? Or, is there something else afoot?

Others, besides me, are asking these same questions.

Copyright by Sher Zieve

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