REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Frogs Aren't Marching
The Rove prosecution vanishes into partisan air.
So much for having Karl Rove "frog-marched" out of the White House "in handcuffs." That's the fate Democratic partisan Joe Wilson once predicted for President Bush's political guru, and yesterday his hope and accusations vanished like fog on the Potomac.
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald informed Mr. Rove's lawyers on Monday that he'll bring no charges as part of his investigation into who leaked the CIA identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. Mr. Wilson's original claims that Mr. Bush lied about Iraq intelligence have been discredited many times over, including in a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee. And now we know that even the relentless Mr. Fitzgerald has concluded that the charge that Mr. Rove criminally blew Ms. Plame's CIA cover is false.
The mystery is why Mr. Fitzgerald kept Mr. Rove twisting in the wind for so long. The prosecutor has been on the case for 2 1/2 years, and he long ago learned the source for the July 2003 Robert Novak column that "outed" Ms. Plame and was the reason he was appointed. Mr. Rove was forced to make no less than five grand jury appearances, the latest as recently as April.
In the end, it seems Mr. Fitzgerald was trying to trap Mr. Rove over the minor matter of his failure to remember a conversation with Time reporter Matthew Cooper. But Mr. Rove is the one who later volunteered information about the conversation to Mr. Fitzgerald, after a check of White House records reminded him of it. A perjury or obstruction accusation based on that inconsequential discrepancy would have been prosecutorial misconduct.
The Rove decision also finally discredits the accusation that there was some grand White House conspiracy to smear Mr. Wilson. Mr. Fitzgerald has brought no charges concerning the original leak, which means there was no underlying crime. His entire case--and this entire "scandal"--has been distilled to charges of perjury and obstruction against one man, former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
And that one case comes down to nothing more than the fact that Mr. Libby's memory of conversations with three reporters differs from that of the reporters themselves. Think we're exaggerating? Here's how the judge in the case, Reggie B. Walton, summarized it in a recent ruling on evidence: "The charges against the defendant are based entirely [our emphasis] upon what the defendant has said was discussed during his conversations with these news reporters."
Those conversations took place in the summer of 2003, while the reporters didn't testify about them for Mr. Fitzgerald until a year or more later. Memories aren't always perfect, and Mr. Libby's lawyers will no doubt have ample room to cast doubt on those recollections against the record of notebook entries and public statements made by the reporters. Mr. Fitzgerald will also have to prove why a seasoned lawyer such as Mr. Libby had a motive to lie if there was no underlying crime to cover up.
We should add that the lack of any underlying crime also means that Mr. Fitzgerald's pursuit of journalistic sources in this case violated the Justice Department's own guidelines, which state that "there should be reasonable grounds to believe . . . that a crime has occurred, and that the information sought is essential to a successful investigation."
Mr. Fitzgerald could ignore those guidelines because he was a "special" counsel subject only to the supervision of the friend who appointed him, former Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey. Only weeks into his probe, he had his official orders changed to include investigation of perjury, suggesting that even at that early stage he had concluded that the original leak was probably not a crime.
The tragedy of this episode is that a political fight over the war in Iraq was allowed to become a criminal matter. Mr. Wilson spun his false tale in an effort to discredit the war and deny Mr. Bush a second term. The liberal media put partisanship above their own interests in demanding a special counsel probe of "leaks"--until that probe turned on their own sources. The Attorney General at the time, John Ashcroft, passed the buck to Mr. Comey by recusing himself on flimsy grounds--an act of political and legal abdication.
So what we are left with is a three-year political spectacle that has kept the White House under siege during a war, weakened or pushed out of office some of its most important aides, and made liberal celebrities of Mr. Wilson and his wife. And to what public purpose? A prosecutor with more wisdom than Mr. Fitzgerald would have long ago understood he was injecting himself into a political brawl, closed his case, and left the outcome to the voters.
