The Political Chase

NYT Needs an Ignore Option

The New York Times needs an ignore option, like in an Internet chat room, allowing you to block dullards or those that are offensive and obnoxious. The obvious place to implement the feature is the Op-Ed section with a default setting on John Tierney.Tierney must have been writing  his column for today’s edition while watching Patrick Fitzgerald yesterday; it’s obvious he wasn’t paying attention.

Tierney does not understand what obstruction of justice means and the significance of the crime. A nine-year-old child could grasp Fitzgerald’s politely obtuse explanation of the criminal charge.  Maybe Tierney was out playing in the sand box with the six year olds from around the block.

The best news yesterday was what Fitzgerald didn’t do. He didn’t indict anyone for seemingly minor discrepancies in testimony. He didn’t indict on vague conspiracy charges. He didn’t indict anyone for leaking classified information. 

Prosecutor Fitzgerald succinctly stated yesterday, that he was not able to get to the heart of the matter – the initial element of his investigation – because Scooter Libby lied creating a significant obstacle to gleaning the truth about the alleged crime. What is unclear about Fitzgerald’s statements that clearly indicate Scooter Libby’s perjury and false statements prevented revealing the facts, which quite likely was that Scooter Libby and others committed more serious crimes?

It’s critical that when an investigation is conducted by prosecutors, agents and a grand jury they learn who, what, when, where and why. And then they decide, based upon accurate facts, whether a crime has been committed, who has committed the crime, whether you can prove the crime and whether the crime should be charged.

And given that national security was at stake, it was especially important that we find out accurate facts.

But as important as it is for the grand jury to follow the rules and follow the safeguards to make sure information doesn’t get out, it’s equally important that the witnesses who come before a grand jury, especially the witnesses who come before a grand jury who may be under investigation, tell the complete truth.

It’s especially important in the national security area. The laws involving disclosure of classified information in some places are very clear, in some places they’re not so clear.

And grand jurors and prosecutors making decisions about who should be charged, whether anyone should be charged, what should be charged, need to make fine distinctions about what people knew, why they knew it, what they exactly said, why they said it, what they were trying to do, what appreciation they had for the information and whether it was classified at the time.

Those fine distinctions are important in determining what to do. That’s why it’s essential when a witness comes forward and gives their account of how they came across classified information and what they did with it that it be accurate. I think what we see here today, when a vice president’s chief of staff is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, it does show the world that this is a country that takes its law seriously; that all citizens are bound by the law.

So I ask everyone involved in this process, anyone who participates in this trial, anyone who covers this trial, anyone sitting home watching these proceedings to follow this process with an American appreciation for our values and our dignity.

Carrying on further after the analogy of the baseball game: 

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.

As you sit here now, if you’re asking me what his motives were, I can’t tell you; we haven’t charged it.

So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make. 

I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge. 

This is a very serious matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter. But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime. I will say this: Mr. Libby is presumed innocent. He would not be guilty unless and until a jury of 12 people came back and returned a verdict saying so.

But if what we allege in the indictment is true, then what is charged is a very, very serious crime that will vindicate the public interest in finding out what happened here.

So, what we have here is that Mr. Tierney, and others like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), does not or refuses to recognize and admit, that the crime remains unsolved because Scooter Libby obstructed justice, and maybe for his own protection.  Violation of the Espionage Act and treason are high crimes.  But according to Tierney, who obviously has more information than Fitzgerald (did he get it from Judy), there was no crime to investigate.

The leak was imagined to be a deliberate crime, part of an elaborate plot to cover up the administration’s efforts to hype prewar intelligence. But from the start there was always a much simpler explanation: that it was an accident by administration officials replying in kind to leaks from a critic. It was unrealistic to expect the investigation to yield any grand geopolitical lessons, and it didn’t.

Tierney is so far gone he can’t even profess stupidity to absolve himself of those statements.

The great dullard closes with:

For now we seem to have lucked out with Fitzgerald. He deserves credit for not trying to justify all his work with a rash of dubious indictments, and he’ll deserve more credit if he resists the temptation to drag this investigation out much longer. Enough is enough.

I can say Tierney is right about one thing.  Enough is enough. My time would be better spent reading a Mad magazine, which would be far closer to reality than one of John Tierney’s rambling columns.

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