FINALLY! SPECIAL PROSECUTOR NAMED
FOR "TRAITORGATE" INVESTIGATION

From the Houston Chronicle:

Attorney General John Ashcroft on Tuesday stepped aside from a potentially volatile investigation into whether government officials leaked the identity of a CIA agent, and a tough Chicago prosecutor was put in charge of the probe.

The decision to appoint a special prosecutor, pushed by congressional Democrats in recent weeks, could accelerate a politically sensitive inquiry into whether Bush aides breached CIA security and possibly endangered an agent to retaliate against a critic of the war in Iraq.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, an appointee of President Bush to head the Chicago federal prosecutor's office, was picked to head the investigation by Deputy Attorney General James Comey.

Click here for more.

And click here for CNN's coverage of the story (with a few different details).

I have a few thoughts on this, of course. The first is that there is still a big conflict of interest here. That is, Fitzgerald is a Republican. Remember the days of White Water? Remember that Kenneth Starr was not only a major Clinton-hater and hard core conservative, but also the second independent counsel to oversee the investigation of the failed Arkansas real estate deal? The point is that a special federal judicial panel replaced Robert Fiske because he was seen by the GOP as not being partisan enough, even though he was a Republican: only a venom spewing believer in Clinton's Satanism would suffice. By that standard, this new guy sucks; one can easily imagine that, as a Republican and presumably a Bush supporter, Fitzgerald has good reason to pursue the kind of soft touch investigation that Starr steered away from. Furthermore, Fitzgerald is a Bush appointee who, as pointed out by Senator John Kerry, carries the "same baggage as John Ashcroft." To top all that off, Fitzgerald was tapped as special prosecutor by, you guessed it, another Bush appointee, Deputy AG James Comey. Comey's assurances that Fitzgerald is "apolitical" strike me as total bullshit.

Secondly, the Chronicle article cites "experts" who contend that finding leakers is extraordinarily difficult to do. That's crazy: Robert Novak, the pompous talking head who revealed Valerie Plame's name to the world, knows exactly who the leakers are. Subpoena the fucker. In my non-professional opinion, this is not a violation of the freedom of press. Novak is a pundit, not a journalist--he spouts his bullshit opinions for a living; he doesn't report news. Take him down. If Starr was running the investigation, he'd have Novak over a barrel. It is a felony offense to reveal a CIA agent's name; time for some heavy plea-bargaining. Atrios over at Eschaton even goes so far as to say that that the DoJ already knows who leaked the info:

Anyway, there's no way the investigators in this case, if they've been trying, don't know who the culprit(s) is/are. If they've questioned all top administration officials then whoever told the press would've told them. Whether they have enough evidence to prove it is another question.

Finally, I have to ask why is Ashcroft deciding to pull out now? The conflict of interest has been written on the wall from day one, but he only acknowledges it now. Why? I'm willing to bet that something has happened behind the scene that has not yet been divulged. Maybe Ashcroft is trying to distance himself while he still can.

If we're all lucky, this could explode. Here's hoping.

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