Ken Starr

In today's Wall Street Journal Dorothy Rabinowitz compares Pat Fitzgerald to the prosecutor of the Duke rape case.

The obligation to truth, the prosecutor argued, was of the highest importance, and one in which Mr. Libby had failed by perjuring himself. It would be hard to dispute the first contention. It is no less hard to avoid the memory of Mr. Fitzgerald's own dubious relation to truth and honesty -- as, for example, in his failure to disclose that he had known all along the identity of the person who had leaked the Valerie Plame story. That person, he knew, was Richard Armitage, deputy to Colin Powell. Not only had he concealed this knowledge -- in what was, supposedly all that time, a quest to discover the criminals responsible for the leak of a covert agent's name -- he had instructed both Mr. Armitage and his superior, Colin Powell, in whom Mr. Armitage had confided, not to reveal the truth.

Special prosecutor Fitzgerald did, of course, have a duty to keep his investigation secret during grand jury proceedings, according to the rules. He did not have the power to order witnesses at those proceedings not to disclose their testimony or tell what they knew. Instead, Mr. Fitzgerald requested Messrs. Armitage and Powell to keep quiet about the leaker's identity -- a request they understandably treated as an order. Why the prosecutor sought this secrecy can be no mystery -- it was the way to keep the grand jury proceedings going, on a fishing expedition, that could yield witnesses who stumbled, or were entrapped, into "obstruction" or "lying" violations. It was its own testament to the nature of this prosecution -- and the prosecutor.

That's right - Mr. Fitzgerald was overzealous. I'm not going to even bother getting into the fact that the Bush administration as a whole decided that outing a CIA agent was just the cost of doing business in covering up their lies in starting a war. But I wonder what Ms. Rabinowitz thought of Mr. Starr?

Where was the underlying crime in the Clinton impeachment? If adultery is still a crime on the books in DC we would see most of Congress behind bars.

I am so sick of the right saying that Scooter should be pardoned while Clinton's persecution was righteous. When they are put on the spot they really have no answer, because the only true answer they can give is - I don't like Clinton so he should have been impeached for a blow job and I like Scooter so it doesn't matter that he lied.