There may be turn out to be similarities between the two legal matters, both prosecuted by Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, but there is little similarity in the treatment of the two men. To argue that Libby and Blagojevich were treated alike is uproariously false.
One colossal difference is that the bureaucratic and genteel processing of Scooter Libby did not include arrest. No guns, few badges; no nightsticks; no handcuffs. Libby was not arrested. He was indicted. This is not a news flash: In white-collar criminal cases, indictment is more typical than arrest. The news is not that Libby was indicted. The real news is that Gov. Blagojevich was not.
The absence of an indictment, of course, did not make the news, that cold December morning when the U.S. Attorney’s FBI allies arrested Blagojevich in a daring pre-dawn raid on his house in Chicago—very quietly, as they assured the public in a press conference the same day, so as not to wake the children. The news item that flashed around the globe, saturating the daily news cycle from its earliest moment, was the governor’s arrest.
The day before the arrests of Blagojevich and top aide John Harris, the Northern District of Illinois also issued a simultaneous subpoena for the governor’s records on 32 other parties. This news item was not mentioned at the gaudy Dec. 9 press conference but has since been retrieved via a FOIA request by reporters at the Chicago Sun-Times. Remarkably, one of the persons mentioned in the Dec. 8 subpoena is Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko—the Chicago immigrant fundraiser long since the subject of a lengthy investigation by the NDIL, tried and convicted in a lengthy trial in 2008.
In response to questions about the Rezko part of the subpoena--was the Dec 8 subpoena the earliest NDIL subpoena to Gov. Blagojevich about Antoin Rezko? And if so, why wasn’t the governor subpoenaed about Rezko earlier, given that Mr. Rezko was investigated for some time and has already undergone trial and conviction?—NDIL press spokesman Randall Samborn replies 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 his sentencing, Samborn replies, “Rezko has a status hearing on February 4. Thank you.”
The belated subpoena for Blagojevich, about Rezko, months after Rezko’s trial, suggests that the Tony Rezko trial was not envisioned as somehow ‘flipping’ Rezko to get Blagojevich.
Looking at that Dec. 9 arrival of FBI agents to handcuff Blagojevich at his home, the different handling of Libby must strike any rational observer forcibly. Scooter Libby was eventually convicted on four counts in the CIA leak matter, but spared prison time by President Bush, as Fitzgerald surely anticipated he would be—that notion that Libby would somehow by ‘flipped’ to incriminate the Vice President was always wishful thinking in the blogosphere. Meanwhile, he was extended every courtesy. At no time was he yanked out of his office or his home. He was unhindered in the performance of all three of his remarkable government positions; he was given ample notice of the investigation at every juncture. Sensibly enough from a prosecutor’s point of view, he was politely invited to appear before a grand jury, to make statements that resulted in his conviction. That grand jury was the second one in the case, convened by Fitzgerald immediately after the first grand jury disbanded—when Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward belatedly revealed that he was a leakee of that tip about Valerie Plame Wilson’s being CIA, and that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was his leaker. You have to appreciate the way Woodward and Armitage were slammed into a side pocket just when they presumably felt they had stymied investigation. Their macho-man discussion of the item is preserved for history in the Libby trial exhibits, on tape and in transcript. But the point here is that there were two grand juries on the matter, and Libby never had to go 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’, etc., the entire process was handled with punctilio.
In fact, prosecutorial courtesy extended so far as to postpone Libby’s trial until after the 2006 congressional elections. This move, reportedly at defense counsel’s request, blunted political damage to the GOP, which lost seats but would have lost more had the Libby trial been held beforehand.
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