I'll be keeping an eye on his website.

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc/index.html

I hope you are right Mr. Johnson. I always figured this case might be the undoing of the Bush cabal. Rightly so. As a former president has said, “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

See the video. Bush the Elder really said it.

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/28/video-bush-i/

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Ugh. You have got to be kidding.

The right wing chorus is based on the supposedly new news that Armitage revealed the identity of Wilson's wife, or at least the aspect that she was involved with the CIA and Wilson's trip to Niger. How much of an excuse has the right wing ever needed to go into hyper mode?

I've always had concerns about Fitzgerald. It isn't simply that he's not Ken Starr. He's not like just about any other prosecutor in existence. Prosecutors often move on to politics (assuming they're not already political positions) or higher up in the legal system - a judge. That usually involves high profile exposure and high profile means publicity much more than it means quality prosecution. A conviction in a high publicity case (even a wrongful one) usually is a career boost. Meticulous plodding methodology rarely advances those careers. Geez. Rudy Guiliani became NYC mayor through having video crews follow him on bullshit arrests. The real convictions of crime bosses in NYC came after Guiliani moved on - to bigger and better cameras.

After reading the Huffington Post posting by Peter Lance I really find myself questioning Fitzgerald's interest in convicting anyone in the Bush government and more importantly, doing whatever he can to put a stop to the lawlessness that continues to pervade it. Does getting a conviction of Karl Rove really matter? Getting Rove and others to stop damaging America is far more important. Rove disclosed classified information. Rove damaged important work to defend America against foreign interests with likely bad intentions. To George H. W. Bush Rove is a traitor (based on Bush's past speeches - whatever that's worth). But saving Fitzgerald's career while stuck in a highly political case seems more important to Fitzgerald than saving America from criminals in the highest places.

You've got SFA basis for saying Fitzgerald is about to do something. An imaginary fart in the wind to swoon over. What has happened recently to base your forecast on? What new unknown information has Fitzgerald found? What new investigations has Fitzgerald followed? He long ago said his investigation was over. If there was evidence to indict anyone other than Libby, what is he waiting for - America to turn completely into a banana republic? That'll probably take one more real terror strike.

Read Peter Lance's post and you'll get an idea that Fitzgerald isn't all that great an investigator or prosecutor. That is unless what's wanted is a slow motion case of some underling who lied for his boss. A case that can be disappeared at any moment with a pardon. What does Bush have to lose with a pardon? After election day this November there won't even be any political fallout for other Republicans.

An excerpt from Lance's post:

But that was only half of my story. The other half was the astonishing saga of how the two bin Laden "offices of origin" -- the FBI's New York Office (NYO) and the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, allowed Mohamed to operate with impunity for years. How key special agents in the bin Laden Squad (I-49) like Jack Cloonan desperately played catch-up as Mohamed planned the Embassy bombings. How John Zent, Ali's west coast control agent was totally outgunned by him, getting caught up as a material witness in a grisly triple homicide in Fresno in 1992 when he should have been riding herd over the al Qaeda sleeper. How it was Zent who vouched for Ali and got him released from Canadian custody in 1993 - allowing him the freedom to help plan the Blackhawk Down operation and the Embassy bombing plot.

My most astonishing, findings involved Patrick Fitzgerald, the former head of Organized Crime and Terrorism in the SDNY, who had allowed Ali to remain free as early as 1994 even though he named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Day of Terror case. Another of my key findings was that Fitzgerald buried probative evidence of an al Qaeda New York cell in 1996.

Beginning in January 1996 Fitzgerald effectively ran Squad I-49, but I learned that despite wiretaps on the key cell members and hard evidence in 1997 that Ali Mohamed (an FBI informant) was a major player in the Embassy bombing plot - he allowed him to remain free.

Most shocking were two face to face meetings Fitzgerald had with Mohamed in 1997. After the first meeting in April "Fitzie," as Cloonan called him, declared Ali "the most dangerous man" he'd "ever met" and announced that "we cannot let this man out on the street."

But Fitzgerald did, even though in October of 1997 Ali told him that he loved bin Laden and didn't need a fatwa to declare war against the U.S. where he'd become a naturalized citizen. Fitzgerald had convicted blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 9 others for seditious conspiracy two years earlier, yet he permitted Mohamed to operate in the open and didn't arrest him until after the simultaneous truck bombings in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7th, 1998 which followed Ali Mohamed's 1993 surveillance with surgical precision.

Fitzgerald and Cloonan then took more than 18 months to get a plea bargain out of Mohamed, who never truly betrayed al Qaeda. They kept him in Manhattan Federal jail for 9 months on a John Doe warrant for fear the media would get wind of their negligence and actually prevented him from testifying in the Embassy bombing trial in 2001 because of the embarrassment that cross-examination of Mohamed would cause the Bureau and the Justice Department which had allowed bin Laden's top spy to work as an FBI informant.

Worse, while they had Ali in custody for three years, Fitzgerald and Cloonan failed to extract the 9/11 plot from him, even though they knew that the plot had commenced in 1994 in Manila, almost four years before Ali's capture. As the man who had lived with bin Laden and personally trained his security detail, Mohamed knew every twist and turn of it.

Within days of 9/11 Cloonan rushed backed from Yemen and interviewed Ali, whom the Feds had allowed to slip into witness protection, and demanded to know the details of the plot. At that point Ali wrote it all out - including details of how he'd counseled would-be hijackers on how to smuggle box cutters on board aircraft and where to sit, to effect the airline seizures.

In effect, my telling of the Ali Mohamed story holds Cloonan, Fitzgerald and a host of other key Feds responsible for not stopping the 1998 Embassy bombings or the 9/11 plot.

Hey. I live in NYC. I remember the completely botched handling of the Kahane assassination. Some of the people involved with that murder were also involved with the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center and that group had ties to the people that did finally bring it down. Do you think if America had quality investigators and prosecutors involved maybe some of this wouldn't have happened?

Fitzgerald has done nothing .. NOTHING .. worthy of praise. He has gotten nothing, convicted no one and stopped zero criminal activity of a criminal organization. At the same time Fitzgerald has made sure that as little information as possible about what his investigation has found is disclosed to the American public. He has accused Libby of lying. And the right wing response has been "A lie? So what?" It would be nice if Fitzgerald spelled out "what" in terms of the damage to America, the damage to the Constitution and the rule of law, and the damage to efforts to defend America from those that would do us harm. Instead we're told that the lying has kept him from knowing what bad things have happened. Career first. America second.

I'll praise Fitzgerald when he actually does something to help protect America and Americans. And .. as the saying goes .. I should live so long.

If true (and I am not saying I have any reason to doubt it or believe it) this is a bombshell.  The passage you cite accuses Fitzgerald of professional negligence/misconduct which directly allowed the attack on 9/11 to occur.  That is a much bigger smear on his reputation then the wingnut's attacks...if true.

The first question you ask is quite interesting... although tempting to suggest that Fitzgerald isn't done with the Bushies, I think it's fair to say political operatives - not least Karl Rove's acolytes - reflexively criticize anyone who has the ability to investigate what's going on in the Executive Branch.

I think the more pertinent question at the moment is what Fitzgerald might still be looking into. Realistically, given what has recently been revealed, the best guess is that it is the facts around the secret State Department memo from which Armitage gleaned the information that Plame was CIA (though apparently the memo failed to denote her classified status).

This memo did not just suddenly arrive out of the ether - someone pretty important will have asked for it. And someone senior will have signed off before it got circulated; I'd also venture that someone senior may have decided to declassify the information contained in the memo. (remember the hullaballoo some time back about "when the president declassifies information, it's not classified"... just what was this GOP talking point in response to?)

Another open question vis a vis Armitage is his 3 month bout of chronic amnesia. Let's recall that when Novak exposed Plame and the DC media could find nothing else to cover, Armitage had spoken to Novak about a week previously. King George then went all righteous on us, threatening to fire anyone who had leaked classified information. Then the DoJ appoints a federal prosecutor in September to investigate the crime of Plame's outing. Then, only in October, when Novak pleads innocence in his syndicated column, did Armitage figure that he might have been the source. (Let's leave aside the fact that whether or not Novak's source was a "partisan gunslinger" is largely irrelevant for the purposes of the investigation).

I'd venture two reasons for Armitage's 3 month accountability siesta - either he believed the information had been declassified (and therefore wasn't concerned about the media storm), or he reckoned that other people - with a motive to attack Wilson? - were giving the media the same information.

One last point on how this investigation winds up - and Hitchens, in his latest splenetic article actually touched on this - is this: if the whole investigation of who outed Plame comes to nil, it's no skin off Fitzgerald's back. Indeed, it doesn't really reflect poorly on the Wilsons either. Instead, it is the CIA that gets zinged. Either because they filed a crime report to the DoJ without properly ascertaining whether or not Plame was covert; or, because they failed to protect one of their employees and a front company. Both seem rather far-fetched scenarios.

And a very final point to the person who questioned whether Fitzgerald has ever achieved anything in his professional career - I suggest you get in touch with Conrad Black, Richard Perle, or any of the other Hollinger Group kleptocrats. It took 8 years, but Fitzgerald's people have them indicted on 11 counts of fraud. It's certainly the case that the Bushies will not be satisfied until Fitzgerald says he's finished on the Plame investigation.

Fitz also was pretty successful in Chicago.

An example of a high-profile prosecutor that did not go on to politics is Scott Turow. Some folks just like doing the right thing.

Then again, there's Rudy. If we're looking at NY, how come there were no improvements in first responder sytems after the '03 bombing?

slightly OT, but perhaps Mr. Johnson can shed some light:

armitage got plame's name (and not her status) from a memo by Marc Grossman at state. Would Grossman have the clearance to know that Plame was CIA?

"If it is true that Dick Cheney screws 6 year old boys, that is also a bombshell."

Did I miss something?

"If true (and I am not saying I have any reason to doubt it or believe it) this is a bombshell."

I think her response was very careful: If these accusations are TRUE, it IS a bombshell, but she is waiting for more information.

What is wrong with that? So in response, you post an obviously bogus, made-up scandal about Cheney in order to CONFLATE THE TWO, which is disengenuous at best.

PS --> So what's the poop on Cheney?

Jan Knaus

That certainly bears out what I've heard and read about Fitzgerald over the past couple of years.