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Fred Thompson: Libby Prosecution a 'Travesty'

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Former U.S. Senator and "Law & Order” star Fred Thompson calls Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's prosecution of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby a "travesty and injustice."

While serving as chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee in the late 1990s, the Tennessee Republican led the effort to allow the Office of Independent Counsel to expire, and he remains wary of prosecutors with too much power.

"When you put too much power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable people who have every incentive to focus massive resources onto one particular person - who gets the plaudits in the media for doing so - it's a bad thing,” Thompson, who attended the Libby proceedings last week, said in an exclusive interview with ABC News. "And many, many times an injustice can occur.”

Thompson believes it is appropriate for the U.S. Attorney General to appoint a special counsel only if a clear violation of the law has occurred, and said the Libby case does not meet that criterion.

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  He claims it was obvious that Valerie Plame, the CIA operative whose identity was leaked, was not covered under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act that.

"There was no indication that a law had been violated," Thompson told ABC News. "That's borne out by the fact that nobody's been charged with outing her. The Justice Department knew that early on. The CIA should have known that early on. Special Counsel Fitzgerald had to have known that at the very beginning. There was no law that had been violated at the time the investigation had been started.”

Thompson, who also served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and plays a district attorney on TV, said Fitzgerald "turned out to be a fella who can see miles and miles in a straight line, but had no peripheral vision at all and didn't realize apparently that he was caught up in a bureaucratic political dogfight."

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