Some conservative commentators, including Chris Wallace interviewing then-Vice President Cheney on Fox News Sunday (Dec. 21, 2008) initially paralleled the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on Dec. 9, 2008, to the indictment of I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, on Oct. 28, 2005.
Both legal matters were prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, but there is little similarity in the treatment of Libby and Blagojevich.
One leading difference is that the bureaucratic processing of Scooter Libby, genteel from start to finish, did not include arrest. No guns, few badges; no nightsticks; no handcuffs. Libby was not arrested; he was indicted. This is not singular: In white-collar criminal cases, indictment is more typical than arrest. The news is not that Libby was not arrested; the real news is that Gov. Blagojevich was not indicted.
The absence of an indictment, of course, was not what made news that cold December morning when the U.S. attorney’s FBI troops arrested Blagojevich in a daring pre-dawn raid on his house in Chicago -- but quietly, as they assured the public in a press conference the same day, so as not to wake the children. The headline that flashed around the globe, saturating the 24-hour news cycle from the first moment, was the governor’s arrest. Most media outlets took two weeks or more to cease calling the charges an ‘indictment.’
In another item not making the news, the day before the arrests of Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, the Northern District of Illinois also issued a subpoena for any and all of the governor’s records about 32 other parties. This and other subpoenas, not mentioned at the gaudy Dec. 9 press conference, have been retrieved through FOIA by the Chicago Sun-Times. One person mentioned in the Dec. 8 subpoena is Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko -- the Chicago immigrant fundraiser long since a subject of investigation by the NDIL, tried and convicted in a lengthy trial in 2008.
Rezko’s name on the subpoena at this late date raises questions. Was Dec. 8, 2008, the first or only time Gov. Blagojevich was subpoenaed about Rezko? Why would that be, given that Mr. Rezko had been investigated, tried and convicted already? NDIL press spokesman Randall Samborn replied by email, “I’m sorry, we do not comment on subpoenas or investigations.” Questioned about the date for Rezko’s sentencing and whether Rezko is being held in solitary confinement until sentencing, Samborn replied, “Rezko has a status hearing on February 4. Thank you.”
Right-wing bloggers and media outlets predicted for months that the highly-publicized Rezko trial in Chicago was going to ‘get’ then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Liberal bloggers asserted conversely that it was going to ‘get’ Blagojevich by getting Rezko to ‘flip’ on the governor, a theory rebutted by the belated subpoena about Rezko, months after Rezko’s trial.
Looking at FBI agents arriving on Dec. 9 to handcuff Blagojevich at his home, one is struck by the different handling of Scooter Libby. Scooter Libby was eventually convicted on four counts in the CIA leak matter but was spared prison time by President Bush, as Fitzgerald undoubtedly anticipated; the notion that Libby would somehow be ‘flipped’ to incriminate the vice president was always wishful thinking in the liberal blogosphere. (See below.) Meanwhile, Libby was extended every courtesy. Unhindered in the performance of all three of his government positions, at no time was he yanked out of his office or his home; he was given notice of every juncture of the investigation. Sensibly enough, prosecutors invited him to appear before the grand jury to make statements -- which resulted in his conviction. That grand jury, by the way, was the second one, convened by Fitzgerald immediately after the first grand jury disbanded, at which juncture -- what were the odds? -- Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward disclosed that he had been leaked that tip about Valerie Plame Wilson’s being CIA by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (who suddenly realized that he was the leaker after watching television news reports). One has to appreciate the way Woodward and Armitage were slammed into a side pocket just when they presumably thought they had stymied the investigation, their macho-man discussion preserved on tape and in transcript among the Libby trial exhibits. But the point here is that an investigation that went through two grand juries never put Lewis Libby through a humiliating ordeal with investigators. Notwithstanding wishful thinking in the blogosphere about ‘perp walks’ and seeing Karl Rove et al. ‘cuffed’ or ‘frog-marched,’ the entire process was handled punctiliously.
Indeed, prosecutorial courtesy extended so far as to postpone Libby’s trial until after the 2006 congressional elections. This move, officially at the request of defense counsel, blunted electoral damage to the GOP, which lost seats but would have lost more had the Libby trial been held beforehand.
Remarkably, the special counsel agreed to the postponement even though on May 4, 2006, Vice President Cheney and his people were given permission to see everything relative to the CIA leak investigation, permission indicated to Fitzgerald via the Justice Department. As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) revealed in a congressional hearing on July 24, 2007, on the U.S. attorneys firings, Cheney and other administration personnel had official free rein to be informed of anything transpiring in the CIA leak matter from at least May 4, 2006, onward. Then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed the one-page Justice Department memo authorizing this remarkable access.
The article continues here:
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4374.shtml
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
