|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Patrick Fitzgerald Nixed Harkin Investigation
A little more than a year before he was tapped to head the special counsel probe into allegations that the Bush administration "outed" CIA employee Valerie Plame, then-U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald abruptly dropped a wiretapping probe into Sen. Tom Harkin's campaign, saying no laws had been broken. On Sept. 3, 2002, Harkin operatives arranged to secretly tape a strategy meeting by his then-Republican opponent, Rep. Greg Ganske. Brian Conley, a former aide to the Iowa Democrat, made a digital recording while attending the meeting at the request of Harkin staff member Rafael Ruthchild, according to the Des Moines Register. Conley then returned the recorder to Ruthchild, who provided a copy of the recording and a transcript to a reporter. The Ganske campaign immediately cried foul and demanded that Polk County Attorney John Sarcone launch a criminal probe. Patrick Fitzgerald, who headed up the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago, also launched an investigation.
Story Continues Below Meanwhile, the key players in the case gave every indication they believed they were in legal jeopardy. Conley and Ruthchild refused to speak to investigators on the advice of their attorneys, with Ruthchild resigning from her job. Sen. Harkin staunchly denied he had any prior knowledge of the possibly criminal tape plot, though prosecutor Sarcone declined to interrogate him - an indulgence Mr. Fitzgerald apparently also granted. After a brief two week probe, Sarcone - a Democrat whose sister worked for then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in Washington, D.C. - declared that the Harkin campaign had broken no laws. After a separate but equally brief investigation, U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald announced that there was no violation of federal law by Harkin's team. Fitzgerald's reluctance to pursue the Harkin Tapegate scandal stands in marked contrast to his conduct of the Leakgate investigation, where he's earned a reputation as an aggressive and creative prosecutor who has pushed the envelope and left no stone unturned. However, the two investigations are not completely dissimilar. As with Tapegate, Fitzgerald decided "almost from the start" [according to the New York Times] not to pursue allegations that Plame's outing was illegal, probably because she isn't covered by the federal law in question, the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Instead, Fitzgerald has reportedly made conflicting accounts offered to his grand jury the focus of his two-year probe, issues the Times described Friday as "peripheral" to his initial investigation. While no one has so far ascribed partisan motives to Fitzgerald for pressing his case long after determining that Plame's outing wasn't illegal, reports that he is a Republican turn out not to be true. Born of working class immigrant parents and raised in heavily Democratic Brooklyn, New York, Fitzgerald was educated in liberal bastions like Amherst College and Harvard University. Asked in 2001 if he had any political affiliation, the Leakgate prosecutor told the Chicago Tribune: "I'm an independent."
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Inside Cover Stories
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2009 NewsMax.Com |