By Printus LeBlanc
If you couldn’t tell by the collective gasp from Washington D.C., late last week President Donald Trump pardoned an innocent man, Scooter Libby. The mainstream media went crazy believing the pardon was a signal to the current Special Counsel Robert Mueller, letting him know he will pardon anyone he prosecutes. What is more important is Trump’s pardon rights a wrong. Scooter Libby was caught up in the net of an overzealous Special Counsel that showed no interest in getting to the truth, sound familiar.
On July 14, 2004, the late Robert Novak wrote a column titled “Mission to Niger” for the Washington Post. In the column, Novak responds to a previous article by Ambassador Joe Wilson stating, “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.”
That paragraph launched a Special Counsel investigation trying to identify who Novak’s source was that leaked the name of Valerie Plame as a CIA officer. Then Deputy Attorney General James Comey, there’s a familiar name, appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the issue.
It quickly became apparent that Fitzgerald was not interested in finding out who leaked the name but was more interested in going after Vice President Dick Cheney. At the time there was an ongoing political struggle between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney. Colin Powell’s Deputy, Richard Armitage would eventually admit to being Novak’s source, but no charges were filed.
Novak himself wrote about his ordeal with the Fitzgerald in 2006 claiming Fitzgerald knew who the leak was early on stating, “For nearly the entire time of his investigation, Fitzgerald knew — independent of me — the identity of the sources I used in my column of July 14, 2003. A federal investigation was triggered when I reported that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was employed by the CIA and helped initiate his 2002 mission to Niger. That Fitzgerald did not indict any of these sources may indicate his conclusion that none of them violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.”
Not only did Fitzgerald know who the leaker was, Fitzgerald told the leaker to be quiet about the leak. Richard Armitage told CBS that Fitzgerald, “asked me not to discuss this, and I honored his request.”
This begs the question if Fitzgerald knew who leaked the name early on in the investigation, and Armitage was not indicted after he admitted to the crime Fitzgerald was supposed to investigate, what was Fitzgerald investigating?
Libby would eventually be convicted of obstructing justice and perjury, not because he lied or obstructed justice, but because different people had different recollections of conversations they had with Libby. Imagine trying to recall every phone conversation you had within a three-month period perfectly. If you get calls mixed up, you are guilty by that standard of “justice.”
The Mueller investigation is starting to look an awful lot like the Fitzgerald inquisition. Neither Special Counsel investigated what it was originally formed to investigate. If Mueller was investigating Russian interference, wouldn’t he investigate the Russian hack of the DNC server? There have been no reports Mueller has looked at the hack or Wikileaks, which published the DNC and John Podesta emails. It has been proven Fitzgerald knew who the leaker was but continued to harass people in hopes of getting to his ultimate prize, the Vice President.
Perhaps the most important lesson to take from the pardon of Libby is that President Trump now knows Mueller is not about justice. Mueller is about getting the highest-level scalp he can, just as Fitzgerald was. The President should not talk to Mueller because as the Libby prosecution shows, getting one of hundreds of phone conversations confused can be your downfall.
Printus LeBlanc is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government.
